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This afternoon I have put the questionnaire online for you to complete. When logged in to Reasonate you will see a link to it next to your name at the top left of the window. Filling the questionnaire in is hopefully very easy. When you click the submit button your feedback will be recorded, your name ticked off a list and the Questionnaire link will disappear from your top menu.

Now that this is out of the way I will be going through all the website call for helps tomorrow (Sunday) and checking that everyones website is working. I have not heard anything from Mike Donn but I am assuming marking will probably begin sometime next week. If I come across any issues with anyones website I will contact them via email and put a comment on their blog. 

When submitting your website to Reasonate run through the following checklist:

1. Have you have copied your website onto the R-Drive?
2. Is the website in the correct directory? (the one with your name)
3. Is index.html at the very top of the folder structure (i.e. not buried three folders down)
4. Have you checked the site by going to:
   http://www.vuw.ac.nz/architecture-onlineteaching/courses/bbsc303/students/2006/(Lastname)_(Firstname)
   

If you answer yes to all of those questions then press the sync button on Reasonate. You will find it on your blog page next to the Edit and Tag This buttons. It looks like an arrow going around in a circle.

Once you have pressed the button a little message will tell you that the sync process has started. Reasonate will go to the location mentioned in step 4 and open the index.html file. Using this file as a reference it will copy across all the linked files and references, literally rebuilding your website on the Reasonate server. If all goes correctly you should have a carbon copy of your website on Reasonate. If something fails check this post for some answers, make a few changes and start the sync process again.

Info sync.jpg

The websites in general look okay, if anything many people have spent too much time on getting them looking pretty rather than throwing one together in a night and then going off to do work on your design papers. You are after all training to become architects and building scientists, not website designers (even if there is a lot more money in the later).

As you upload your files to the R-Drive and they get copied across to Reasonate you will in no doubt notice a few issues. Here are the main ones and how to fix them:

Hyperlinks that don’t work

If you find a hyperlink that does not work check that it is not pointing to a resource on one of your network drives (e.g. I://web/about.html).

Missing normal images

Likewise with missing images check that the image source is not pointing to a resource on a network drive. All images should use relative urls (i.e. images/example.jpg).

Missing rollover images

The Dreamweaver rollover technique seems to have been used a lot by people which is unfortunate. It is 10 years out of date and really unsightly with all that Javascript code. Because of all the Javascript the copy process from the VUW server to the Reasonate server does not ‘see’ the roll-over images and as a consequence it does not copy them across.

The easiest fix for this is on one of your pages at the bottom insert all your rollover images. The copy process will see all these images and copy them off the server so that when the Javascript runs the image it is looking for is on Reasonate.
Now you will be thinking, this is going to look silly, I don’t want a page with all these random images on it. To get around this problem go into the html code view enclose all those image tags with the following: 

<div style=”display: none;">

….All your rollover image tags i.e. <img xsrc=”images/myrollover1.jpg”/> ….

</div>

This <div style=”display: none”>..</div> set of tags will hide all these images from view. The copy process will still see all the images and download them for you but to the normal user they will not notice anything at all.

Alternatively for a solution that is far prettier but more time intensive checkout image rollovers using CSS. This is definitely in the extra's for experts category but also a technique that if you are planning on doing more websites you should get to know.

I checked through everyone’s R drives today for the presence of their web pages.
The following people did not have any website related files in their R drive hand-in folder (as of 10:00am Friday 2nd June). This maybe because of a different hand-in time or perhaps you have it copied to the wrong location:

The following people had a website in their R-Drive but they did not have an index.html in their hand-in folder. The index.html file MUST BE in the hand-in folder, not buried two or three directories down. If it is not in the correct place the process that copies the files from the VUW server to Reasonate will not work.

For the website hand-in please submit it to the R drive as there have been issues uploading files through the SOAD firewall. If you are not working from the University however you should be able to upload your Reasonate via ftp or webdav using the instructions provided.

I will be adding a process this afternoon that will synchronize your R-drive directory with Reasonate so if all goes well you should have your websites on Reasonate by dinner. Do not panic however, if you have issues please contact me via email describing your problem. The best way to do this is to write a Reasonate post and then check the notify administrators option below.

Gidday

Due to a marvellous little feature of Viz there is apparently nothing we can do about the collapse  of Viz when we try to render in Light Studio. This feature is something that AutoDesk tried to implement to help people, but according to one expert I consulted it is a feature that many users of Viz worldwide are complaining about! So if you are members of the architectsrule.org collaborative because you have downloaded Viz/Revit etc - please complain! Now! LOUDLY! Everyone! I could have done with more time to prep my travel and your classes than trying to solve their problems.

So:

WHAT TO DO?

fortunately the answer is simple: use 3DS MAX 

The interface inside the program is much the same.

The material editor, the renderers, the sun system for Light STudio etc are all the same.

As we have 30 licenses of Max and 90 of Viz, please only use this program if you have had Revit render problems with Light Studio in Viz...

Good Luck! Hope no more issues come out of the woodwork to bite us in the soft unprotected regions ...

M 

Hi

I will be on a 'plane at 4:30pm on Tuesday heading at first to a  seminar on

Generative Components  run by Bentley about which you can find out more here I will not be at Tuesday's lecture. You will however be in very good hands - with some crucial information that should assist the hand in...

For this reason, I plan to come to make a presentation at the Tuesday 11:30 and the 1:30pm  tutorials on Light Studio materials as the lecture room LT1 demo has been a little unsatisfactory for me thus far.

M 

REF: dolphins  

Gidday

Tuesday 30 May 3:30pm. For those who don't remember, the lectures are in LT1.

David Harrison has kindly agreed to talk through the process that he has described in his blog post on the summary web pages you are creating  for this Thursday's web site hand in.

Rachel Ryan will talk through how to post your files to a Google Earth locale.

============================================================== 

 Remember, the publish options in Dreamweaver that David has blogged will work from outside the schools of architecture and design. They do not work from inside the school. SO: IF YOU ARE PUBLISHING USING DREAMWEAVER FROM INSIDE THE SOAD:

when you set up your site  (or when you edit an existing site) as per the instructions in David's blog, mine and David's lectures and in the 'my first web page' tutorial on the bbsc303 web site, there is a small change that needs to be made:

When you select the remote info location to publish TO; you  should set

• the access as Local/Network
• the Remote Folder as your R:\drive file hand in location (REMEMBER your index.html file should be at the start level of this folder - the level defined by your name, not some sub-folder)

Please do not forget what we have talked about in class, and what is on the assignment web site:

ASSIGNMENT 2: 

you hand in around 1 June 2006 (check web site timetable for  the date relevant to your class group)

you hand in a web page / pages on 2 June that summarises the model making / collaboration process and has a pointer to a web page / pages where the renders will appear the following week

ASSIGNMENT 1:

you hand in around 8 June 2006 (check web site timetable for  the date relevant to your class group)

you hand in the web page / pages with the renders in thumbnail form,  linking in each case to the larger format picture.

Gidday all

I have a thought that will help us all:

It is that we can all help each other develop a guide book / helpful suggestions good practice guide to rendering by tagging our problems and solutions appropriately. My idea is that we will rapidly reach a stage where when you have a problem / issue with rendering you will search through the tags for that program to find how other people have dealt with the issue.

So: could we please  use the following tags on the relevant blog entries:

Light Studio

Mental Ray 

Dreamweaver

Materials

People

Furniture

Skies

Plus, could you please add a tag of

Light Flow Meter 

to all uploaded pictures / questions about the array of white balls to be placed in a sectional view of your building about which Merete gave a lecture a couple of weeks back.