In this lab you will make some modifications to your Xanga page, using some of the material covered in lectures. You will link a number of pages together in a meaningful fashion, and add an image with an image map to your Xanga site.
Access W3Schools or vrarchitect or the lecture notes on HTML to remind yourself how to create hyperlinks.
Go to your Xanga "Look and Feel page". You find this by clicking on your Xanga name on the small menu list at the top right of your main page. (You have to be logged in to be able to do this.) Then click look and feel in the menu list on the left.
Paste this:reviewsand
events.
If you have a custom skin installed the events may not show up. Just remove it for the moment, and do the lab, later you can experiment with modifying your skin to get it to work.
Experiment with creating events. You should start thinking about what you might use the Xanga site for beyond the learning journal. The lab classes ask you to do various things giving you experience with a live web page. In the end, it will need to look and feel coherent for the assignment, and for you to be able to show someone what you did this semester. It could be a family album site, or about a hobby you have or ... The learning journal part fits as it documents how you learnt how to do things with websites etc.
Now that you have experimented with creating events, and have given some thought to the theme of your Xanga page, figure out how Xanga refers to events. Do this by looking at the page source html when you're at the events page. If you search in the html source for names of items you can see in the normal browser window should be able to work it out. (Hint: search for an event you have entered by searching for the underlined day number.) If not, ask your tutor for help. Add a hyperlink using the <a ...> tag to another event.
Once you're sure its working, link some of your events together in a meaningful fashion, with at least some links forward or backward in time between events. Decide for each link whether it should open in a new window or the same window (tip: target=_self). Today's event (i.e. your lab time) should explain how and why you've linked events.
Oh yes, the theme or coherence will be something for the assignment, you can get full marks for the lab now even if you do something which doesn't fit the overall theme. But that will mean going back and modifying later, so its worthwhile trying to set a theme now. But please don't wait to do the lab until you have a theme!
Menu File / Open
Play with different menus from the Image / Adjustments choices. Start with automatic adjustment and then switch to the manual ones if you are not satisfied with the automatic results. Have fun. But don't play too much: there are still lots of things to do.
Crop it to show only its interesting parts or to change its meaning.
Resize your image so that its largest dimension (width or height) is no more than 600 pixels.
Select the file format that suits your image. Use the Zoom tool to examine the artifacts, play with the different compression parameters. Save one compressed version of your choice.
You have seen enough detailed videos, so for that task, just use the following clues. Think about adding the "title" attribute to each link in the image map, as Image Ready doesn't include them. Provide at least two different links from your image. Save the work in a different HTML file from the original.
Tip: to get the Image Map
palette to appear, select the Menu
Window > Workspace > Interactivity Palette Locations
and
it should appear on screen. If not, check that Image Map
is
selected in the Windows
menu. Alternatively, you can Preview
in Safari
and copy the URL from there.
Now upload your photo to Xanga. If you chose to edit the image, Xanga will tell you what html to use to refer to various sizes of your image. You will want to use the original size. Add the Photo URL into the image map you are constructing as the src of the image. You can now paste the whole <img ...> and <map ...> into your Xanga look and feel.
Test that it works, and describe the image map (the effect you wanted to achieve, etc) in an event.
In general, we will expect you will put some explanation of the work you've done in an event for your normal lab time. If you do the work later (which is OK), please still put the words in an event for the lab time so your tutor can find it more easily. These explanations in events are about _what_ you did and _why_. What you learnt etc or thought about goes in the weblog learning journal. The two are mostly different but not completely.
Update your learning journal, reflecting on the lab, lectures any other reading or browsing you've done related to the course etc. E.g, did you learn anything about absolute versus relative links, or the coordinate system of an image map etc?
A powerful multiplatform photo gallery generator is JAlbum: http://jalbum.net/. In the past we've used Galerie (freeware) which should be installed in the labs, so that's probably the most useful during the lab.