Week 12 in PAL

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Ben

The assignment is out. It looks the same as what we did last year. A copy is available for you to download here. We’ve compiled a list of example work from last year for you to browse for inspiration.

Name	Practical Work	Charity Website	Blog
Alex Jegtnes	Practical Work	The Society for Starving Students	The Blog That Shouldn’t Have Been
Ben Argo	Practical Work	Piers Crispin Heart Foundation	Introduction to the Wub
Charlie Tizard	Not Available	PETZ	Wubstep
Dushyant Kanungo	Practical Work	Scholar	My Blog
Grey Hargreaves	Practical Work	Save the Spycrab	Grey’s Introduction to the Web*

* Grey’s blog is “Intentionally terrible since 2010.” Please do not use it as a good example.

More Practical Work

The remainder of the session will be spent looking at further HTML structures, directory structures and an introduction to CSS. More content will follow here.

Hello iOS 5!

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Ben

Well, I’ve been using iOS 5 on the iPhone and iPad for a few hours now. My first impressions are as follows:

Firstly, my iPhone seems more responsive, slightly faster, although I’m trying to work out whether thats due to me actually doing a fresh install and not restoring from a backup.

iMessage seems totally awesome, i feel it’s going to save me a fortune on international text messages (even if they’re only 6p on giffgaff).

I’m glad to see the return of the iTunes app for the iPhone. I was wondering where that went. I missed being able to purchase songs as they come into my head.

The reminders app looks interesting, I’m yet to play with it in detail, but it certainly looks like a better replacement for some of the shoddy to-do apps already out there. However, I think this may make some app developers quite unhappy.

I love the fact you can change the tones for just about anything now. I’ve gone a little bit nostalgic and changed my ringtone to the Nokia tune, my text message tone to 3 seconds of Peter Griffin laughing, and my email tone to the very 1990′s America Online “You’ve Got Mail” tone. I think I could have some fun for a while listening to those.

The basic twitter integration is an excellent idea, the idea of linking it within apps is perfect. If only Apple would embrace Dropbox with the same functionality. I don’t know if this is going to have an adverse effect on twitter app developers, since I’ve not been using any other app but the Atebits one, but it may do.

iCloud is definitely a good idea, and I’m glad its now provided as a free service. I’ve been using MobileMe for 2 years and I love it, and now that I don’t have to pay for it it makes it even better. Maybe iCloud could have Windows support for my friends still using Windows OS. However, for me with an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and an iPad it’s brilliant.

To conclude, I think a lot of hard work has gone into iOS 5. If anything the release of this should have been the flagship of their recent keynote, not the new iPhone 4S. Well done Apple. I hope you can continue to impress me despite the loss of the late Steve Jobs. May he rest in peace and his spirit remain within Apple forever more.

Week 11 in PAL

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Ben

Week 3 is aptly named “Dive into HTML 5.” There is a very good website that we used as a great resource last year with the same name, which we suggest you look at. It’s also available as a purchasable book.

We plan to be throwing you straight into practicing HTML, and as such we’ve devised a small practical assignment that should get you comfortable with working with it. The best way for learning HTML is really through playing with it.

Mini-Practical

First we want to get you comfortable with making a basic HTML structure. An example one can be found below. Take a look at it, study it, and then set about creating your own, including whatever information you deem necessary.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Basic HTML Structure</title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Secondly, we need to get you aware of what goes inside the <head> section of an HTML document. The head is where we include information that handles what happens on the page, how it interacts with search engines, and where we can include stylesheets and scripts. For an example, see the source code of this page.

Finally, there’s a list of valid HTML 5 tags available here (Don’t use the W3Schools version). Please choose 5 of them, preferably ones you don’t already know, find out what their usage is and create an HTML page with the basic structure we made above and practice playing with each of the tags. Below (or within) each of the tags, try to write a couple of sentences about its usage, where, when & why it should be used, and what it means semantically.

Hello world!

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Ben

Welcome to my blog. Yeah I’ve made blogs in the past, not managed to stick to them very well though. Hopefully this one will go better. Why did I make this one? Well…

Firstly I thought it would be a great place for me to improve my writing style, since conveying ideas clearly and concisely is not one of my strong points. Ergo this blog will be a place for me to improve said skills.

Also, I enjoy talking about my interests, experiences and findings. Being able to share stuff is great, and the World Wide Web has opened up so many new platforms for sharing things through. This will be my feed to the world. Follow it if you wish, I’m sure there will (eventually) be something that interests you.

Finally, I wanted to play around with WordPress, simple as. I hope you will join me in enjoying my experiences and and this blog doesn’t become a waste of a database and PHP scripts.

Week 10 in PAL

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Ben

For week two we covered a mix of topics. During the first half we recapped the concepts of theory discussed within the lectures, namely:

Internet vs. World Wide Web
TCP/IP Protocols
HTTP(S), (S)FTP, POP3, IMAP
Other Protocols
Practical Usage of your Web Space

For the second half we took a look at HTML. The idea is for the next few weeks we will continue to play with HTML so you become comfortable with it.

Week 9 in PAL

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Ben

Week 1 was all about Introductions. We ran through a PowerPoint presentation to provide our contact details and session structure. We provided a tour of local facilities, including the Project Room, FET IT Support, and various music labs for the Music Technology students. Ben also provided a tour of local computing facilities, including a demonstration of the Windows and Unix drives provided by FET, an explanation about personal web space, and differentiating between central IT provided storage and faculty-specific storage.

Attached files:

PowerPoint presentation

Les Lézards

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Ben

Les Lézards is a bed and breakfast in the Creuse region of France. Les Lézards commissioned a website for their business, built on the content management system Drupal. Work included customising a chosen theme to fit specific needs; guidance on usability; search engine optimisation and a Google Maps API static map.

See the full site…

Web Air

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Ben

Web Air was a group web development project completed for the “Systems Development” module during my first year at university. Working as a team with Alex Jegtnes, Charlie Tizard, and Mark J. Smith, we created a fully-functional website utilizing PHP & MySQL technologies to book virtual flights around the UK.

My personal responsibilities laid with the database creation and the bulk of the PHP development.

View the source code or the full site…

Crimson Pink

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Ben

As my first major freelance project, Crimson Pink is an e-commerce website built on the content management systems Joomla! and Virtuemart. work involved theme development, component customisation and database manipulation, including creating some standalone apps to allow mail merging using the CMS customer base.

See the full site.

Ben Argo

Web Developer

Author Archives: Ben