Touching base
Just had a short session with the GD and LA 3rd year students to review the eDesign Diary project. In contrast to our last meeting, the response was very positive with by far the majority of students indicating that they thought keeping the blog would be beneficial to their design work. The blogs themselves bear this out; of the 33 blogs currently listed, 18 of them have more posts than our guideline one-per-week.
A few students have been slow to get started and I hope that this short session will give them a bit of a boost. Certainly, they can't be immune to the enthusiasm of the majority.
I gave a quick overview of the 2 issues that had come to my attention so far, namely, spam comments and image uploads. Basically, the image upload is sometimes a bit flaky but works most of the time although the upload is also quite slow. I recommended that they use JPEG format files of 1000 pixels or less which are reasonably compressed. As for spam comments, I pointed them in the direction of the short tutorial I made last week and recommended that they turn on word verification. I notice today that there is a new option on the "Posting" tab, Moderate comments. I haven't seen this before and I guess it must be new. Details can be found here - it looks as though it will be useful.
A third issue arose during the discussion that I need to address, that of image placement. A number of students were having difficulty getting text and image to look the way they wanted. This is understandable - they are designers and would like their blogs to look good. It doesn't help that the post preview does not show the post as it will appear once published. I will put together a few basic pointers that will help them do this but in most cases, the issue can only be overcome by hacking the code. I will include some code examples for those that would like to get their hands dirty.
A few students have been slow to get started and I hope that this short session will give them a bit of a boost. Certainly, they can't be immune to the enthusiasm of the majority.
I gave a quick overview of the 2 issues that had come to my attention so far, namely, spam comments and image uploads. Basically, the image upload is sometimes a bit flaky but works most of the time although the upload is also quite slow. I recommended that they use JPEG format files of 1000 pixels or less which are reasonably compressed. As for spam comments, I pointed them in the direction of the short tutorial I made last week and recommended that they turn on word verification. I notice today that there is a new option on the "Posting" tab, Moderate comments. I haven't seen this before and I guess it must be new. Details can be found here - it looks as though it will be useful.
A third issue arose during the discussion that I need to address, that of image placement. A number of students were having difficulty getting text and image to look the way they wanted. This is understandable - they are designers and would like their blogs to look good. It doesn't help that the post preview does not show the post as it will appear once published. I will put together a few basic pointers that will help them do this but in most cases, the issue can only be overcome by hacking the code. I will include some code examples for those that would like to get their hands dirty.
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