Friday, September 22, 2006
Yesterday was my deadline for prepping the material for my next Information Architecture course for the Faculty of Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. What I have found from previous classes is that there are usually students who have problems with the school's own ftp site for downloading course materials, and usually I have to set up a directory on one of my Web sites for them to grab material from.
So I decided to simply register another domain and point my students to that instead. I would have liked to get the informal name "InfoArch.com" or the .net or .org variants of the same, but they were already taken. "InformationArchitectureCourse.com" was available, but the longer the name, the more likely spelling errors are likely to creep in. So I ended up registering "InfoArchCourse.com", put up the necessary files the school needed, and whipped together something simple, using a pre-existing CSS template I ran across that I liked.
I have to hand it to BlueHost, in that they make the process easy -- certainly easier than my previous web host provider did. Registering is quick and painless (and relatively cheap at $10 U.S. a pop), and then parking the new domain to an existing one (in this case it is linked to a subdirectory of this blog site) is accomplished in a few easy steps.
At this point my ambitions for the site are modest and largely functional: a place where my students can easily find and download materials relating to the course, which so far are contained within a couple of encrypted zip files. There is also some basic promotional materials relating to the course, and I've taken a stab at adding the sites I reference in the course, and that's about it. The text content is derived largely from what's on the equivalent FIS site describing the course, cobbled together in haste last night after putting the kids to bed.
At the moment the site is a far cry from what I would say would be an ideally constructed site based on Information Architecture principles, so I have my work cut out for me.
Not much to see as yet, but it's there and functional, which is all I need at this stage.
Labels: BlueHost, CSS, domain, Faculty of Information Sciences, InfoArchCourse.com, Information Architecture, University of Toronto, web site
Friday, September 01, 2006
This has been a work in progress for the better part of the past couple of weeks. When I moved the captmondo.com to a new Web host (because the previous one I had used, WebRaided, went belly-up), I found that they offered scads of drive space, more than I could easily think of ways to fill.
On a whim I decided to see if the domain miscellaneous-s.com was taken. It wasn't, and ordering it for a year was only $10 U.S., so I picked it up and attached it to the CM site as a sub-domain.
I found a free CSS template I liked from AndreasViklund.com, modified it to suit my tastes, and started ripping my old "S" CDs into 128kbps MP3 files for download. I found the files that comprised the old site (which Toby Steel had previously hosted, and that I put originally together, some of the pages at least a decade old), salvaged what was still useful in terms of text and images, and started compiling things using the new template. Things came together surprisingly quickly, and I found some old pics and doc files that had never been used on the old Web site to expand things further. Spent the better part of an evening finding and compiling information on Alan Wright and Toby Steel, two band-members who both died in the summer of 2004. I intend to ad more, but am satisfied with the start I've made to what amounts to an online memorial to them both.
Earlier in the week I contacted the surviving members of the band and solicited their comments and input. Thankfully everybody approved of the project, with Ian submitting a story about doing the Peterborough concert, Pierre sending a piece on his remembrances of the "Big V" concert (one I will always regret not having performed at), and Bryce emailed the classic text for the "press release" announcing the official launch of the site.
The end result is very satisfying. Bill remarked that its likely audience is probably limited to just the band members and few else besides, but I can live with that. The "S" was always about silly fun, and this qualifies.
Labels: captmondo.com, CSS, Miscellaneous "S", MP3, WebRaided
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