This chapter was about html tags that can’t be so easily categorized into one group but are nevertheless still useful to know. I’m pretty proud to have finally learned out how to make an iframe show up on a webpage, as that was something I had trouble with in my technical writing class.

Chapter 8 webpage

Chapter 8 code

This chapter was about making forms with html. It was a lot of information, as there are many different types of forms, so I will probably have to reference this chapter again if I ever have to make a form in the future.

Chapter 7 notes webpage: -note- I made the submit button on one of the file input boxes a picture of the color yellow, so admittedly, it is a bit abstract-

Chapter  7 notes html:

This chapter was about making tables with HTML. A cool/helpful way to practice this would be to make a table for my course schedule next semester.

Also, in my notes I forgot to mention the <thead>, <tbody>, and <tfoot> elements, which separate the body of the table from the first and last rows and are also are picked up by screen readers.

Chapter 6 notes webpage (cut off a little)

Chapter 6 notes html (cut off a little)

This chapter was about images, and it was a little tricky. At first, I could not figure out how to get my images to show up when I opened the html in a browser, but after a while I realized I was typing in .jpeg for the type of image rather than .jpg (Jack fail).

One thing I could not figure out was why the text aligned to the middle and bottom beside the left aligned accordion picture. I did not write the html for the text to align like that next to those images so I will have to go back later and figure out why it did that.

This chapter also talks about interesting stuff that can be done with image editors, like making simple animated gifs, creating vector images, and resizing images. I want to start learning more about design and image editors in general so this was helpful information. Relatedly, I found a pxleyes blog post that has a lot of free GIMP tutorials divided by skill level, so I am going to check them out later.

Chapter 5 notes webpage

Chapter 5 notes html

This chapter was about links. As I note in the webpage, I should probably review linking to different parts of the same webpage.

Chapter 4 html

Chapter 4 webpage part 1

Chapter 4 webpage part 2

Side note-I just noticed that I have a lot of bookmarked sites.

For this chapter I took my notes in Notepad and just made them into a webpage. One drawback is that now my webpages are too big and I can’t capture everything in one screenshot.

Oh well. I’ll let future Jack worry about that.

This week’s chapter was about the different types of lists you can make in html.

Chapter 3 code

Chapter 3 webpage

Making this website as my professional profile was definitely a learning experience. The hardest part was probably making the menu tabs act right. For example, it took me a while to be able to have them drop down when hovered over, but I like how they turned out. Every post I have is in an appropriate place under the tabs and that makes it easy to navigate the site. I also use a lot of links throughout my posts to explain things/ give useful background information, which I think is helpful for people coming to my site.

I like the section of this website dedicated to documenting my html learning process-the “HTML Learning Adventure” tab.  I plan on continuing to post there as I go through Duckett’s text, as it is, I am proud of what I have managed to learn about html, having started with zero knowledge of it. Eventually, I would like to create my own professional website from scratch (rather than by using WordPress) which will probably have some of the same posts from this website for example my service learning project but more customized.

In terms of design choices for this  website, I made sure I used images that were free use and did not require attribution. In terms of colors I chose the blue background because I remember this article by Thomas R. Williams we read in ENGL 3110 said that a blue is a good choice for a background because of how human eyes work blue looks further away and it contrasts with the foreground images/texts making them easier to read. And I chose the green for the header because, well, I like green.

Creating this profile also made me realize how I need to improve in certain areas. For example, my professional social media presence could use a little work, however, in the social media tab I do explain steps that I will tak to improve this so I am confident that I can better my social media presence. Another aspect of my professional presence that needs improvement is my portfolio. So far I have the service learning project under my belt, which is great but I need to work on adding to my portfolio. I think learning html will help me with this as I can create websites or improve them and show my work in a portfolio.

Overall, I think this website is a good start for an online professional presence. I learned a lot making it and will continue to add to it in the future as my skill set grows.

For this project I had to give a 5 minute presentation about what I would be doing for the client (in my case Chattahoochee NOW.) The client was busy that day so I gave my presentation to the class. Here is my pitch. It is very short, as we had to keep it under five minutes and might not make sense on its own as it is an aide to a speaker and not an asynchronous work. I feel like this was a good start, the slides I have here laid the foundation for the organization of my final draft and some of the slides even made it to the last draft. In the pitch, I break down the project into sections such as Identity and Connectivity. This also shows the progression of my project as I was first asked to put the maps into the Access section, however, it ended up making the Access section look too heavy and it threw off the balance of the presentation so I ended up separating the maps from the goals section. This showed a rhetorical awareness of the author’s (the client’s) needs. The client also asked me to keep the same look and feel of Vision 53 and I think this pitch shows that as I use the same colors for the goals headings and I use images from the report for all the slides.

For the reading annotation I basically had to do just that, annotate readings. However, I had to use the online resource hypothes.is. It was an interesting experience. How hypothes.is works is that you put the url of a website you want to annotate into their form and then it will pull up the website with hypothes.is buttons on the side that allow you to write comments. Your comments are then saved onto your hypothes.is account and available for viewing whenever. What I thought was interesting about hypothes.is was that in addition to just highlighting text and writing comments on it you could also get multi-modal by adding images, sounds, and links to other websites. I am probably going to use hypothes.is again for research with online sources as it allows you to highlight online text which is more helpful than writing your notes down in word and getting lost when you try to find what section of a text you were writing about. One thing that was annoying about hypothes.is though was that it often would not save my comments and I had to go back and redo a couple comments because of this. Also comments that I made on other people’s comments would not show up on my account, which was irritating as I was pretty proud of some of those comments. However, overall hypothes.is was pretty useful. Also the readings themselves for ENGL 3110 were interesting. One of my favorite reads was this article by Janie Kliever talking about fonts. I got a lot of tips in there that I ended up using in my work for Chattahoochee NOW, like for example that serif fonts are better than non-serif fonts for body text. Also, the reading annotations were good practice for technical writing a part of our comments had to summarize/explain what a text was talking about and I feel like that is exactly what technical writers do in that they take complicated information and try to break it down so it is easier to understand. A quote I liked a lot from this class was that “technical writers make tacit knowledge explicit.”

In truth, I do not get on social media very often. However, that is something that I would like to change! So, I decided to make a twitter account for technical writing. I could use it to connect with the technical writing community by following and engaging with relevant organizations such as the Society for Technical Communication. So if you are interested in technical writing (or just awesomeness in general) follow me on Twitter @JackYtzack

Also, click here to see my LinkedIn profile. Side note- Having just made a LinkedIn, my profile is a little lacking. But I plan on adding to it in the coming days.