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Website: http://www.stress-free.co.nz

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.

It is good to see a number of you are diving head first into your personal website development. You must remember that the purpose of assignment 2 is to explain clearly the decisions and processes undertaken during the development of your model and renders.

To determine exactly what is meant by this imagine you are in practice and have just spent 4 months modelling and rendering this building but will be leaving to go overseas next week. You have to document enough so that a stranger to the project can sit down and learn what the project is all about and the processes behind it.

For example a new person to the team would have to understand:

• The file and CAD naming standards employed
• Who modeled what parts of the building in case there are further questions
• How the process by which the model was built and any issues that are not yet resolved
• Useful pieces of information that relate to the project or are generally useful to know (i.e. good rendering settings)

For the most part you have done an excellent job of recording all this information within the Reasonate blog posts. However these blogs posts are only so useful.
If you were the new person to the team you do not want to read everyone’s entire blogs to understand what has happened. What you want to do is read one concise document that has hyperlinks to the blog posts that relate to the information being discussed.

For your assignment 2 hand-in (i.e. your web-page) what you should focus on doing is putting together an html document (or set of documents) that provide this general overview of your project. This document should not recreate all the information you have already entered into your blogs. What it should do is outline the project and its processes in a clear, easy to understand manner and then within this outline provide hyperlinks to the relevant Reasonate blog posts that detail the issue.

Sorry for being deliberately vague on exactly how you should structure and word this document. What we are interested in is how you choose to tackle this problem keeping in mind that your completed work should be clear, concise and make extensive use of hyperlinks to the work you have submitted to Reasonate.

Just to give you some ideas on what is possible, you are not just limited to hyper-linking to a specific blog post (like this).
It is possible to hyperlink to all the things I tagged as funny by copying the url in the browser’s address bar.
Or if you like you could reference all the image files created by your project. To do so perform an advanced search, limiting the results to your project and only image files. On the results page click on the ‘Permalink’ button to get the url for this search in the address bar which you can then copy and paste into Dreamweaver.
If you have any questions please contact me either by posting a comment to this post or to my space in Reasonate.
 

If anyone has blog posts that they wish to be removed or edited before the handin please post a new blog entry to your personal blog entitled:

'Edits I would like to my blog'

Or tag your post:

blog edits 

I will keep an eye out for posts with this title and make any reasonable changes you request. These edits should not be for simple spelling or grammar errors but rather times when you have experienced 'multiple postulation' or even worse, 'premature postulation' (some of you guys will understand) and are embarrassed of their existence.

The SOAD domain has a restrictive firewall in place making it difficult for you to upload your websites to the server using the process first advertised. To get around this problem we have put in place two solutions. The first is for you to use FTP rather than WebDAV to upload your files to the server and the second (if you still have trouble) is to use WebDAV in the method outlined below.

Primary solution: FTP Access

User accounts have been created on the server so that you can upload your websites via FTP. In Dreamweaver’s remote site info box (in your sites preferences) using the following settings:

• FTP Host: www.reasonate.co.nz
• Username: Your Reasonate username
• Password: Your student ID number

Because this was an unintended setup your FTP password is not synchronized with your Reasonate password. Please keep in mind that to access the FTP you will still need to activate your Web Area in Reasonate, to do so go to your Personal Blog, select My Web Area and follow the instructions.

Alternative solution: WebDAV

1. Open My Computer, the quickest way is to press the Windows key and the letter E on the keyboard at the same time (refer explorer.jpg).
2. Move your mouse over to the My Network Places entry on the left hand list.
3. Right click on My Network Places and select open from the context menu that appears (refer explorer_open.jpg).
4. The window will change to display a list of options on the left hand side of the window.
5. From this new menu select ‘Add a Network Place’. A wizard will appear to guide you through the process (refer begin.jpg).
6. Press next until the wizard prompts you for a network address (refer name.jpg). When you get to this point enter your Web Area url (found on your Web Area page) and at the end of it add the characters /#.
   For example for my web area I would use the address:
   http://webarea.reasonate.co.nz/David_Harrison/#
7. Press Next, give your new web place a meaningful name (refer name.jpg) and then press Finish to complete the wizard and open your web area. The wizard will disappear and you will be displayed (refer finished.jpg)
8. You can now drag and drop your website (or delete/rename files) directly in this window.
   The first time you try to make a file change a username/password prompt will appear. Enter your Reasonate username and password to this dialog and Windows will be able to modify files on this folder.

Info explorer.jpg

Info explorer_open....jpg

Info begin.jpg

Info name.jpg

Info finished.jpg

Info complete.jpg

This afternoon I upgraded Reasonate's user interface. Rather than using a lot of space on the side for logging in and creating new posts this functionality now runs along the top of the screen. The extra space is used to provide more room for viewing your personal tags or the tags your team members are using. If you are not logged in you will see all the tags people have used.

You will notice some tags are much larger than others. Don't panic, your eyesight is not going, when viewing the tag cloud more commonly used tags are larger in size than ones that are not so often used.

Sorry to change the interface so drastically and I hope the change does not cause too much stress.

Regards,

David 

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