Module 02

Project Management

This part of the class dealt essentially with using Mercurial (alias Hg) and how the learning curve for that particular tool is particularly steep.

It is not very clear to me why we have to USE this tool in the context we are using it. The work we do is quite individual and does not involve anyone else. Second it is a fairly basic task of writing flat files that seldom need to be revisited, as we mainly add new one. so Mercurial seems very "overkill" to me; I suppose the idea is that we train to use it in order to learn it which makes sense...

Web Design

I'm not very happy with the set-up at this stage: I'm using a text editor to key in HTML and have setup a CSS on a separate file. The main issue is that I have a menu that will allow us to navigate to each page once they are published. But to avoid 404s I the menu items have no links (the links being added each time a new page is added). This means that I need to re do each page to alter the menu every time I publish a new page: that's uncool.

So I thought that I could try and find a CMS that could produce flat files on the fly with maybe PHP locally on my machine. But I don't have much background in web design and that type of software, so I decided to not spend hours trying to learn a new piece of software for that task, and came with the idea of building a quick and dirty solution: building a pseudo CMS using Automator on my Mac... And I spent hours trying to figure out Automator and did not succeed.

I'm giving up for now so that I can get started on this weeks assignment, but if anyone stumbles upon this page and has a solution for me please send me a note.

Assignment: make a web site and upload it to the academy server

If you're looking at it, it means it got uploaded at least.