Oriented.

In which our young hero emerges triumphant from a fortnight's battle waged courageously against the forces of drudgery, breaking free of the shackles of library homework...

It's been a busy few weeks in library school. In addition to the Evaluation paper I alluded to in the previous post, the second part of the TOR was due on Monday. I'd long ago finished my wiki page, and had all but the content done on my HTML page, but it still seemed to come together at the end of the week as a perfect storm of work. I thought I'd report out on the TOR since it was my first ever library technology project.

My familiarity with wikis was, unsurprisingly, shaped by my use of Wikipedia. Despite being a borderline obsessive reader of Wikipedia, my editing experience consisted of correcting a couple of glaring grammatical errors in the pages of others. Still, the TOR page was a breeze. The element of wikis that I like the best is its transparency. When I saw a feature I liked in a Wikipedia page, all I had to do was click "Edit" to see what was going on in the code. It's so simple that it feels illicit, like I'm stealing, but I guess I could also view myself as an architect exploring an old building to see what holds it together. I quickly learned how to make simple charts, frame and re-size photos, and add a table of contents, and I managed to put together a pretty rockin' page.

HTML was a little tougher, but I relied on a couple of W3Schools Online Web Tutorials for the basics. I was determined to make something more complex than the barebones minimal-requirement pages that a lot of folks were turning in (I'm not knocking them... okay, maybe just a little). I was very surprised to find that what I thought had been an innovation of wikis (the transparency of code) was something that had always been available to me if I'd only just selected the "Page Source" option in the View tab of the browser, although that got exponentially more complex than the wiki code. Still, armed with a list of tags and my text editor, I put together a decent little webpage, and even experimented with a css stylesheet. While my more technology-minded friends scoffed at some of the coding choices I made, I maintain that it's pretty good for a first try.

In all, the wiki felt like a better match for my temperament because I could pick at it here and there and make finicky little adjustments to it right up through the homestretch. The HTML site, on the other hand, went live with a couple of errors in it that are just going to have to stay there until I have time to take it on again (Um, January?). Which I will-- a revision is already forming in my mind. Geekdom, here I come.