HTML Code

Although HTML code is very frustrating and time consuming, anyone who is interested in making a website, should have a basic understanding of its use. Even though software such as Microsoft Expression Web is definitely easier to use when making a website, knowing HTML can be a way of solving many problems one may run into. For example, if text on a website is bold and Expression Web will not allow you to un-bold it, by looking at the code, you might find that the font style is a default bold, and you must change the font in order to rid of the bold. Another instance may be if you would like to copy another web site's background color or perhaps some information, it is much easier to look at the code of the site and use the exact same format when writing your code. Without knowing how to read code, you would have no idea where to find what background color was used and would be stuck trying to find a match in Expression Web. A final instance where knowing code is important, is to make sure that a website is capable of being found by search engines. Search engines must parse HTML code in order to find any relevant content. If there is something wrong with your code, the search engine might drop its search from your site and the website will not come up in results. Even though Expression Web will normally contain no errors in code, if you were to have a code that contained error, it is essential to know how to read code, so you can correct the mistake and have the website be found in future searches. Overall, writing HTML code is very tedious and web-authoring software is probably the way to go. Having a basic background of HTML code certainly has its advantages however.

My Favorite Presentations

My two favorite PowerPoint presentations were Cristina’s and Emmalee’s. Each of their presentations made me more interested in their respective topics, especially anthropology. I thought that Cristina did a great job of showing us what she was talking about with all sorts of pictures and even videos. It is so much easier and enjoyable for the audience to actually see what the presenter is talking about with visuals such as she used, opposed to just writing all sorts of information on slides and continuously repeating it. I also thought her background (the outline of the lion) and her animations (lion prints) were very fitting and well done. As for Emmalee’s presentation, I thought that she picked a really interesting story and did a great job in presenting it to the class. The music surely added something to the presentation and the different pictures of Tanta Carhutha helped in gaining a visual for the story. The different backgrounds used, especially Machu Picchu, were very fitting and made you gain an overall appreciation for anthropology. Altogether, these were my two favorite presentations; they surely did a great job in capturing my interest, in subjects I thought I never cared about before.

Searching the Internet

Something that I learned from Chris Nolan's presentation was the directories that are available for use on the Internet. These directories give a good amount of sites on vast subjects and the best part is that they come from recommendations of libraries around the country. This assures you that you are getting sites that have been previously visited and the previewer believed the information was accurate and useful enough to recommend. I will surely use directories such as, Infomine or Librarians' Internet Index the next time I do a research paper. One aspect of the presentation that surprised me was the fact that Google insists they do not rank websites based on how often they are visited. Even though Mr. Nolan himself sounded skeptical, Google claims they rank the websites that appear during a search based on: how often other sites link to a site, how often the search words are repeated in a site, and also whether the search words appear in the title of the site or perhaps just in a small, insignificant paragraph. Although I too believe that Google must take site visits into some consideration when it ranks its websites, they must know what they are doing as Google is by far my preferred search engine.