with a note on CSS stylesheets
and advice on using pictures in your weblogs
This weblog assignment isn't a "my diary" style blog, or a newspaper "media personality" column. You will use a blog format to write short dated reviews of features you notice at online news sites. By writing the blog with HTML instead of a service like blogger.com or knoxviews.com, you get to experiment with page coding, layout and site structure.
Your class weblog should be analysis, not just links, and not just your opinion. From Jan. 23 to April 12, write at least a couple of items each week based on your latest reading. Do major news sites follow the suggestions of the textbook? Has the text author (or the professor) missed an important point? Should pictures be bigger -- or smaller? Are headlines enough information for a site's home page, or does it need longer story summaries?
For example, one entry could be about the way multimedia elements were used to tell a story. Another could compare a news organization's handling of the same story in print and online (or on TV and online). You could point out what was (or should have been) added or removed in the conversion from one medium to another. Try to present both good and bad examples.
How long should each entry be? In most cases 100 to 150 words should be enough to show you're learning from what you read.
Your blog entries should be dated individually, but can be published on individual pages, weekly pages or monthly pages. By the end of January, you'll learn how to take snapshot images of the sites you are talking about. See my note About Pictures on JEM222 Weblogs.
Suggestions of what to read? There are plenty in the book, on Foust's website, and in the link lists on the syllabus, my UT home page (see the word "links" at the top) and in the right column of my personal home page.
What good is this weblog anyway?
NOTE: "Tables" are the original way to control column widths on Web pages. Instead, this page uses a small CSS stylesheet block in its "head" section to:
After you're comfortable with the basic HTML codes, try adding CSS. Use "view page source" to see how it works on this page. Cut and paste the whole style section into one of your weblog or story documents and experiment with changing some of the style settings.
When you develop a style that suits a group of pages, you can save the block of style settings as a separate document and link all of your pages to it, instead of copying it from the head of one page to another. Then, if you change your mind, you can change all of the orange headings blue by changing one word in the stylesheet -- not 100 different "font" commands scattered through your documents.