For all of you interested in new media (web 2.0 stuff), a local npr radio show just did a segment entitled 21st century media. For those of you who went to this past summer's CTCNet Conference it is the show of the closing speaker ( Kojo Nnamdi). He is a brilliant host and I enjoyed listening to it. It is available for streaming download and podcast here.

Greetings!  I hope you all had a safe and fun Halloween!  I hope everyone checked out Corey's most recent blog, Free Food Alert!!! and some of you took the opportunity to get free food while having fun.  Last night, Corey and I did just that, dressing up as burritos and heading to Chipotle for free ones (estimated value between $7-$8).  Afterwords, we decorated sugar cookies and watched the Nightmare Before Christmas.

I'm working on how to get the pictures up.  I'm not a Flickr fan, and apparently you can't just post photos directly into a blog.  I'll keep working on it; as a last resort, I'll just post them to what I use for photos (Picasa), but I want it to be easier than that.  We'll see.

I know that none of this has to actually do with technology or my service directly, but it's VISTA Life and a prime example of how you can have fun on a VISTA budget!

In service,

Laura

Everyone on the CTC VISTA listserv probably noticed some extra e-mail today. Thanks for taking me into your inboxes, and thank you to Matt and Dina for some solid advice!

One of my ongoing projects is creating a website for the UMass Lowell Engineering Service-Learning Program, affectionately known as SLICE (Service-Learning Integrated throughout the College of Engineering). I've been working on the site sporadically for about six months, having done most of the work in February and March. Now that the school year has started, it's time to bring the site online. That means debugging.

It might have been easier if I had used a content-management system for the site, or at the least, used a pre-canned template for the site design. I'm one of these people who likes to do things himself, however, and sometimes I take this to a fault.

I decided to go whole-hog and code the entire site from scratch. Considering that the SLICE folks just wanted a new look for their existing site (which used frames rather poorly), all I had to do was create a template page and type in some text, right? Indeed.

For me, coding a site from scratch means using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for as much of the styling and layout as possible. I avoid using tables to position my pages. Here's why:

• Using a single CSS file for layout makes changing pages go more quickly than using tables, inline attributes (e.g., <div align="">) and <font> tags.
• CSS allows me to simply use a different stylesheet to create printer-friendly pages, screen-reader-friendly pages, and compact pages for handheld PCs and cell phones.
• One 5k CSS file services an entire site, meaning that pages will load faster. For people with broadband connections, this isn't a big issue. For dial-up users, size and speed are tightly correlated.

The use of CSS instead of tables, <font> tags, and inline attributes, along with the use of descriptive "class" and "id" attributes, is commonly referred to as semantic markup, and is a hot-button issue with web designers. The logical conclusion of this would be to design pages using XML, so that you could have a tag called, for example, "<linkmenu>." We're not quite there yet.

The advantages of CSS-based design over traditional design are so persuasive that everyone would design pages this way, right? Not so. Every browser has its own way of interpreting both HTML and CSS, which makes for a trying experience sometimes. Thus people choose to use the traditional methods of web design, involving tables, <font> tags, and inline attributes. At the Grassroots Use of Technology Conference this past June, Ben DiMaggio referred to this difference in design philosophy as the "holy war" in web design.

Taking sides has its drawbacks. For the SLICE site, I wanted to create a simple two-column layout, with a banner across the top and copyright info across the bottom. The left column should be a fixed width so that people didn't have the navigation links resize whenever they resized their browser windows. The right column should allow for browser resizing, at least down to a reasonable amount (say 400-500 pixels) . A fixed-width navigation column next to a variable-width main column? Simple. Just use CSS's "float" attribute. Except that this doesn't work.

Internet Explorer 5 and 6 don't float things very well. If you decide to have a floating left column full of links, things get goofy if you specify any heights or widths in your right column. Woe unto those who like using background images: borders and background images don't play nicely when floated in Internet Explorer. There's a funny-looking "indent" if your right column is longer than your left column.

I tried and tried to solve this with the float attribute, but never with much luck. Either I had to create <div> containers upon <div> containers, which is just as bad, markup-wise, as using tables for layout, or I had to change my CSS. I chose the latter.

With the "position" attribute, CSS lets you position things exactly, down to the pixel. Since my left column was of a fixed width, I just decided to place the main body of the web page next to the links column. The strange indent bug was gone in Internet Explorer, but now Firefox was leaving a strange gap at the right of the page. Since IE still holds the lion's share of browser usage these days, I was happy. Since Mozilla-based browsers have a good 15% share of browser usage, my solution wasn't good enough. In came the listserv.

Matt and Dina graciously offered their help: Matt suggesting that I look at my Document Type Definition (DTD), and Dina offering some tricks with the float attribute that I hadn't thought of. Not quite the right track. Finally, after a few wrong turns, one extra attribute fixed things:

<code>right: 0;</code>

Ten bytes!!! All this work to change ten bytes! And really a fairly intuitive answer: if I specify the leftmost edge of my main column, I might as well specify the rightmost edge also. Most web designers know that a <div> tag expands to fill up the entire width of its containing element. Do they know about this particular exception? I hope so, but I sure didn't.

In addition to the "right: 0;" fix, today I learned about the "Holly Hack," a workaround for Internet Explorer to keep content from disappearing when a page is loaded. Fortunately, learning about this was a 30-minute "read and imitate" fix.

And there's still more to learn. Evidently the CSS specifications changed slightly between CSS 2.0 and CSS 2.1. And I'm still not up to date with Mac IE and Safari. My position often forces me to be a "John of all trades," so I sacrifice some depth of knowledge for breadth. Guess that means that in the web design "holy wars," I'd better not get too holy, because I don't know everything.

--John

I just ran across a great screencast on tagging by Beth Kanter for NTEN.

I had the best day yesterday - I got to take my new boss' Crown Vic across the state to Springfield MA to meet with some folks about doing a digital storytelling train the trainer workshop out there and I met some amazing community workers. 

I'm going to make a little video over the weekend to brush up on my Final Cut Express skills, but here's a lil preview photo of an exhibit I saw in the public library in the North End, made by the most amazing woman named Yolanda.  She's been bringing this growing exhibit about the culture of Latin countries around Dia De Las Muertos (the Day of the Dead).  The great thing about it is that it all started as a way to teach her local police officers not to fear going into Latino houses with these types of decorations as "devil worshipers."  It's all about making community change by distilling fear and ignorance, people.  

Hey everyone, here's a quick update on some things at UMass.

With the Digest deadline quickly approaching, Danielle and I are working to get articles, bios, images, and video up in Drupal. If you wrote an article and have a photo that’s relevant, it would be great if you could send it to me or let me know where I can find it. It will be interesting to see how the Journal works as a finished product in the context of our new site. The Digest has been great because it’s allowed me to see a little more of Drupal and also created an appeal for web based documents and spreadsheets, neither of which I’d given any prior thought. I’ve been using Google’s versions and for my purposes they’ve been just as functional and easy to navigate as Excel or Word.

I’ve also been doing some outreach for the Project, researching local Community Media and Technology (or similar) programs to get involved with. Our aim is to strengthen both the university programs and the Project by sharing connections and resources and providing opportunities relevant to each other’s members. For example, people in these programs are presumably great applicants for the CTC VISTA Project and often these universities offer graduate programs that would be of interest to VISTA members. I’m going to be taking a series of workshops in November with Nettrice Gaskins at MassArt on InDesign so I can get some tangible materials together for some face-to-face meetings.

On the organization side of things, I’ve been searching for non-profits that could potentially use a VISTA in Detroit, MI. Recently, we’ve had more applicants interested in working in Detroit, but the Project doesn’t currently work with anyone there, and as I’m from the Metro Detroit area I was excited to do this. If anyone working in or from Michigan has any thoughts, let me know.

Hope everyone enjoys the weekend.

The recent (2006) announcement that the Nobel Peace prize has been won by Dr. Muhammad Yunus has caught my attention. Part of the prize is shared by a banking system called Grameen bank.

The bank is supposedly working on the principles of community effort, mutual
trust, accountability, and micro credit. It is designed to offer small
loans to poor people in groups of 5, who are otherwise not credit worthy.
The primary requirement for loan eligibility seems to be collective
accountability of groups to repay. Because there is no requirement to back their loans
with collateral, the poor have been able to invest in some trade for their livelihood.

The conditions for loan have helped improve social and economic awareness.

This system appears to have uplifted and improved the lives of many poor
communities in Bangladesh, among whom a big percentage is said to be women. This indeed is a system of community, networking and collective effort that has not only made a success story but also has received a distinguished recognition.

Follow the links for more of this story.

http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/index.html

Comment from danielle martin on October 27, 2006 - 4:33pm

Hey Kamala,

We actually watched a video on Dr. Yunus at our VISTA Leader training over the summer! They used him as an example of a leader thinking out of the box to fight poverty. I think it was a PBS special, narrated by Robert Redford. There's a bunch of videos of him on Google Video and a whole bunch of stuff on Wikipedia. Very inspiring.

 

-Danielle

Click To Play

I had the wrong one for our 2nd place up to start.  This is the true 2nd place entry.