As Far As I Can Tell

In March I’ll be attending the SXSW Interactive conference for the first time. I’ve wanted to go for years but either the money or my schedule always stood in the way. I don’t personally know anyone else who is going but hope to meet lots of new people. If you’re attending and want to meet up let me know. I’ll only be there through the interactive portion not during the music festival.

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Last weekend I taught a Dreamweaver workshop for graphic design students at Western. We went over the basics and worked together to build a small website, which I based on The Gates. It doesn’t offer much beyond the learning exercise, but there are a few extra Gates photos that I took if you’re interested in seeing them.

In preparation for the workshop I scoured the web for free sample chapters from Dreamweaver books. I’ve compiled them alongside tutorial links, sample files, and extra PDFs. I think I’ll leave that page online for a while in case anyone else is interested.

It’s funny how I’ve taught a semester long course and a workshop on Dreamweaver when I don’t use it at all in my personal or professional work. It’s not that it’s a bad program, it’s actually a really useful tool. It’s still quite cumbersome to make standards compliant CSS layouts with it though, and once you understand the markup it’s oftentimes just easier to write it by hand. If you’re curious, my main development program is TopStyle.

Where Dreamweaver really shines is letting non-technical people make websites. They won’t have the cleanest code or properly validating pages but it lets them get their ideas out there, which is to me is very much the beauty of the web. It’s also a halfway decent way to learn the markup by watching what Dreamweaver writes as you make changes.