Eye candy! Rushing the season ...

In class Thursday we're going to look at some more simple HTML tags you can use, and I'm going to link to a couple of websites that show you how to do stuff on the Internet. One of them is full of eye candy, including crawling marquee-style text, different colors of text and animated graphics. This instead of a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.

But first, speaking of eye candy, a link to a picture that definitely wasn't eye candy -- especially not to ex-U.S. Rep Charles Bass of New Hampshire, whose picture appeared like this in a national blog last year on election day. Poor guy lost the election, too. Scroll down to where it says, "Update on a completely unrelated matter -- here's a lesson in how NOT to set up a photo shoot if your name is "Charlie Bass." Poor guy lost the election, too.

A couple of tutorials

The gold standard of tutorial websites, in my opinion is W3Schools, which we've looked at before. W3C -- the World Wide Web Consortium -- sets best practices standards for Web users worldwide. But there are a couple of others I think you'll find useful, too.

One is Joe Barta's Page Tutor. I have no idea who Joe Barta is, but he really gets the hay down to where the mules can reach it. His stuff is written for newbies, and it's good. "First, if you have any of them fancy HTML editors and have an inkling to break em in now... forget it. The worst way to learn is to use one of those things." He's right. And he's right when he says you can come back to the Web editor later, too. I'll even forgive him for leaving the apostrophe off of 'em. I'll bet you caught it, too, didn't you? Correct placement of apostrophes is the meaning of life.

Another website I like is headed "CHEATS." (I am not making this stuff up.) It's part of a website called Cedge's HTML Cheats put up by Creative Edge Design, which appears to be a British firm. It has all kinds of eye candy. You can get into "Edit HTML" (the closest Blogger will let us get to plain ASCII text like you'd get in Notepad), and go wild copying and pasting the simpler ones into your blog text. Have fun with it.

Your assignment today: Write me something on the blog that's kind of Christmas-y, and link to some websites that sound a Christmas-y theme. Like this one about a well-known character in a Christmas story and a sentiment he expresses that we also all know well. You can upload pix, too. Like this. I'll tell you how below.



One word of caution: Be careful not to upload any copyrighted pictures to the blog. You can search under keywords "clip art," though, and upload pix to the top of the page by clicking on the "Compose" tab in the Blogger dashboard and following some very user-friendly instructions.

Here are the steps: (1) copy the non-copyright clip art pix to the desktop; (2) click on the little picture of, well, of a picture in the header; (3) when the "Upload Images" prompt comes up, click on "browse" under "add an image from your computer" and click on the upload button; and (4) Go back and delete the image file from the desktop. You can link to pictures on the SCI/Benedictine website, but please don't link to other clip art pix.