Thoughts of the Week, Part 2

I Could Really Use a Nap

I never thought I could read so much in three weeks.  The phrase “information overload” has taken on a whole new meaning for me… and I am already considering taking another Maymester class next year.  Maybe it is all of the new technology we are covering in class.  I have always stayed away from social media because I do not see the point, but I kind of like watching my Twitter feed.  I liked wrestling with Joomla and creating something that looked like an honest-to-goodness website.  Now, I am waiting for my Assignment 3 interviewee to email me about the questions I sent him.  All of this in less than a month.

Meanwhile, I have also spent the past month preparing for the chaos that descends upon the library every summer.  We call it the Summer Reading Program.  Every moment not spent reading articles for class has been spent drawing and painting and preparing for a Superhero Story Time.  My coworker, a brave volunteer, and I finally finished decorating the library yesterday and now we are ready to kick things off tomorrow.  I know it is going to be a blast.  Librarians, library assistants, and library volunteers really are superheroes!

And I could really use a nap…

Here's a peak at what we've been working on for the past two months.

Level 1: Read 10 books or 5 hours.

Level 2: Read 20 books or 10 hours.

This is my favorite wall.

Lesson Learned: Nothing sticks to brick.
And glue dots don't stick to butcher paper.

We ran out of walls.
This one is behind the desk.

Joomla: The Continuing Saga

On the one hand, I learned about something called Lorem Ipsum.  It is filler text created from a scrambled section of one of Cicero’s philosophical writings.  On the other hand, Joomla also had me scrambled for hours at a time as I tried to adjust pictures so that they looked… just… right… and very often they did not.

After signing up for Joomla’s demo, I watched the tutorial videos and followed along.  I tried downloading extensions and when that did not work, I borrowed a laptop and worked on my Joomla site from there, while watching the tutorials from my computer.  I downloaded the JCE and Akeeba extensions and tried JEvents and a newsletter extension, but did not end up using either of those.  I did successfully add events and teasers that showed pictures.  I also added a cool looking Search bar like the ones on real websites.

While wrestling with extensions and picture placement, I also finally came up with a theme for my website.  With my newfound appreciation for dummy text, I decided to embrace the chaos and dedicate my site to garbled Latin, meta books, and long dead guest authors, creating the Lorem Ipsum Library.

After a while, I started to catch on to the pattern of things on the Joomla Administrator site.  Once the major features were installed and the categories set up, editing and fixing things seemed to be a little more intuitive.  There were so many options and steps and pages and… stuff.  As I continued to create new things to put on the website, I grew paranoid that I would forget to go back and edit something.  (Like that newsletter option.)  Keeping the site simple and straightforward worked best for me.

My biggest problem, as seen in the picture at the top of the page, was a box of text going too far to the right.  Crazily enough, this was what plagued me for the majority of the time I worked on the site.  I just could not get the picture and the text to stay in the white box.  After using my best resources – my awesome classmates – I must have clicked something right, because the text lined right up.  Somehow.

What helped most (even beyond the tutorials) was keeping logged into my Twitter account and checking the class discussion boards every so often.  I got around a lot of problems by asking classmates or reading what someone else had asked.  While the tutorial videos did a good job of taking me step-by-step through how to set up a website, I did not dare wander off the beaten path and try to add, say, a newsletter mailing list, because the videos did not explain all the steps.  Maybe with more time, I would have figured it out, but that just was not possible with this assignment.

The source of most of my website’s text?  Lorem Ipsum Generator: http://www.procato.com/lipsum/