Laurabelle's Blog

This weekend was not terribly illustrious. The ASIS&T Pacific Northwest Chapter Annual Conference was on Friday and Saturday, but I only went to the Saturday morning sessions because I was too energy-less on Friday. I wouldn't even have gone on Saturday morning, I think, if I hadn't said I would volunteer. I'm glad I went, because the presentations were interesting (especially Misty's talk about internationalization of websites, software, and other interfaces).

Just got home home from the ASIS&T National Conference in Long Beach, California. If you don't know where that is (hey, I didn't before), it's south of Los Angeles. What a weather change! It was lovely and sunny, and apparently I missed a pouring storm on Monday. (Jeff sat down in his philosophy class in the afternoon with a sigh, and his prof said I've seen people wetter than you today. Jeff replied, This is my second set of clothes.)

I don't have much time to write at the moment, but I wanted to note that I am indeed back and that I had a lovely and inspiring time and that conferences are summer camp for grown-ups. You go to activities all day, meet people, promise you'll stay in touch, and see them all next year. Yeah?

I just realized that other than a very brief mention to note the fact that I was elected ASIS&T Web Deity for this year, I haven't said anything about one of the current major drains on my time. I should do something about that.

Ooops, I didn't realize it's been almost a week since I wrote last. Sorry 'bout that. Well, life has accelerated somewhat in pace, largely due to my losing about 20 hours each week to KCLS. (Well, losing is a bit of an exaggeration. It's more like trading for money and experience.) Due to my more-severe lack of free time, I haven't had much time for free thinking, much less free blogging. Still, life is going extremely well.

This evening I helped out at an ASIS&T workshop on beginning HTML. Basically the workshop went over the basic structure of an HTML document and a couple of concepts such as paragraphs, links, lists, and images. (The final page everyone created looked something like this example.) I, being the perfectionist that I am, had some Issues with how some things were explained, not to mention how many <br> tags were used, but I managed to contain myself. Mostly.

There wasn't much for me to do for most of the workshop, but towards the end I got a chance to explain stuff to people, not just things that were addressed in the workshop itself but other questions that people had, for example about where to find out the hex codes for various colors. One woman even asked about accessibility! I was really impressed and psyched about getting to explain about proper HTML structure and such. She'd been trying to read about accessibility from the W3C, which is not renowned for, erm, accessible language. (Design, yes, content/language, no.) I pointed her at Dive Into Accessibility and told her that web design is a compromise.

So although I spent 4 hours on that workshop, including transit time, probably could have gotten some work done during those hours, and am very tired now, I'm very glad that I helped out with that workshop. I'm going to be giving another "intermediate" HTML course in a few weeks, with two co-teachers, and I feel like I have a better sense now of where people are in terms of their grasp of web concepts.

I may also eventually get to lead a workshop on web scripting, using the example of a custom 404-error page that uses embedded PHP to send a notification email to the webmaster. Stay tuned!