Sep 07 2008
iweb and google calendars
I have used a lot of different tools for creating websites.
I’ve written the HTML by hand. I’ve used Userland’s Frontier. I’ve written software to generate sites—in Perl, Java, and Scheme. Nothing does what I want, and in the end, it’s mostly a disaster.
In needing to get course websites up in a big hurry this semester, I gave up. I used Apple’s iWeb. This is a program that was made so that a complete newbie could create a website and host it on Apple’s (expensive) .Mac service. I felt ashamed and dirty using it, because I thought that (as an “expert”) I should be using something less… amateurish.
iWeb has worked amazingly, amazingly well. I can drag-and drop things, nudge them around… and really, just get some pages put together quickly. And, it generates valid XHTML and CSS. It is far, far simpler to throw things into iWeb than to use anything else I’ve ever used. After I’m done, I export it, and send it across the internets using Fetch, which works just great.
Now, iWeb is far less powerful than other tools in many ways, but… it gets the job that I needed done. If you’re a busy faculty member who needs to get a website put together for your course, I highly recommend just using iWeb as opposed to any ungainly, nasty tool that you might otherwise be contemplating (eg. Dreamweaver).
The second thing that has made my life easy is Google Calendars. For example, I’ve embedded here the calendar from CMPSC190, a new course at Allegheny called Virtual Worlds and Real Robots. It’s a “pre-intro” to computing for students who think computing could be a lot of fun (it is), but aren’t sure about the whole programming thing yet. A fun, gentle introduction to the discipline. It’s awesome.
That’s a small, weekly-view of the course. On the course schedule page, I have a larger, monthly version. What I love is that I just need to edit the calendar in Google, and the homepage is in sync, because the calendar is embedded, not copied. This means I don’t have to actually edit the course homepage to update the course schedule.
The Internet, as they say, is an amazing thing.
This is an absolute treasure/time-saver. I can edit the course calendar in a calendar, and I don’t have to touch the website to make it update. Absolutely mind-bendingly amazing.
Alright. Back to work. I have more updates to make…
