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!
Aquarion says:
Be careful with that, because it means that when Google searches your site, you get an email for every page that it can't find.
Laurabelle says:
Yes, I know, but I generally find that I don't get that many 404s. (I recently added user-agent info to the email, which especially helps in identifying which hits are bots.) I find that it's worth getting a few noise mails because of bots in order to track down broken links, whether on my site or someone else's.
And actually I've added a nifty feature to the script I use whereby certain pages I've moved and which have a new location send a "301 Moved Permanently" error rather than a 404, which should be a big Cluestick on the head for search engines.
But the workshop isn't going to have much fancy stuff, I think. It'll be a general sort of intro with this as an example of a quick, easy, and above all tangibly useful application of server-side scripting. And it does look like the workshop is going to happen, although not until some time in Spring Quarter (April or May).