It took me a while to get the ball rolling on changing my site to use stylesheets. I understood the basic concept of style sheets, but didn't really know a good way to put them to use. I started off simply with playing around with the setting for the h1 tag, since all of my pages at least have that at the top. I wanted to make the text centered though, and since I didn't see examples of that on the class notes, I went to the most helpful aid a student can have...Google. One of the first pages that came up was the site for the W3C stylesheets recommendations. I found it to be very helpful and a good resource for using Cascading Style Sheets. From there, I started thinking about the basic elements on my page. There's the main title, then I have the date of the entry on the right, then links to the different sections within the page, and links at the bottom of each section navigating the user back to the top. For each of these I used existing classes (h1 for the page title, h2 for the section title, etc.) and created my own classes (major_link for the top navigating links, date for the journal date, etc.). I also started playing around with the colors of the anchors. I changed all the default colors, and when I did, I noticed that at the point where I had put anchors (name="") to target locations within the document, they were also affected by the properties of the links. What happened was, when I changed the color of A, the internal anchors colors changed too...so I set it back to black. After working with stylesheets more on my own, I'm still not completely sure exactly how stylesheets can be used instead of tables. I understand how you can use style sheets to format a table, but I'm not sure how it can replace a table.
This Friday I went to the first lecture series for this semester. A former student Mark Argo was talking about his experiences and about art and technology in the retail space. I thought it was very interesting hearing him talk about what he's doing after graduating from ITP. He talked about his current projects and also talked about examples of how technology is being used in marketing. I liked his insights into the difficulty of creating things for the retail space. He talked about how he took his thesis project and went to Mattel to pitch the idea, and how he found that when he was writing up the marketing pitch, he got caught up in it and had taken out the original ideas behind his thesis from the pitch. He said that if you want to work in the retail space, you have to learn to deal with the dicotomous nature...keep your ideas for why you want to create your project, but realize that the people you are pitching to are really just thinking about how to make money. I really liked attending the talk, hearing him talk about his ideas helped me think of a few of my own that I might be able to work on for my Networked Expressions class. I need to carry around a little notebook or something with me to write these things down in though, because right now...I can't really remember what the ideas I had were.