So exciting! Today I went to the NetPrep Gyrls group at the Boys & Girls Club, talked about being a Web Manager, how I got into Web design, that sort of thing…and then helped the girls write their first Web pages. Not quite as overwhelming an experience as the Summer Camp thing last year, but still quite challenging. I learn a lot from trying to explain to others.
And I wrote a nifty little guide (which I didn’t bring copies of, of course), cribbed pretty strongly from the tutorials that got me going back in the day – the Webmonkey guides and the old Fat Free Guide. But I finally did what I’ve been wanting to do and wrote a guide for beginners that innately teaches how to create fully valid XHTML and CSS. (I did, however, forget to include the meta language tag and the XML namespace, but those should be easy enough to correct.) I think it’s a good start, but I have some more ideas about how to make it more useful, just from the things that came up in class.
One of the trickiest things, oddly enough, is working with Notepad and opening the pages in IE, and I want to write a better step-by-step of that process, along with more information about naming conventions, folder structure, etc. There are so many little things that one just takes for granted, until you have to explain it!
So that was very cool, and very energizing. Just as energizing was talking to Laura, who runs the program, about other networking (people, not computers) activities for women, girls and technology – there’s a forum coming up, and collaboration with a group called Ignite, which wants to start a chapter down in this neck of the woods. The prospect of all this activity is energizing – and just talking to Laura…she’s very enthusistic, and a positive influence on me, since I tend to be rather sedentary & morose, myself.
The epersonae site is coming back, slowly. I’m working on converting the existing html pages to PHP (arg – your-site.com only runs 3.0.15!), finishing up the companion site to the Simple Guide, rewriting the haiku randomizer, and thinking about some more interesting colors. Or not…I haven’t made up my mind yet. (oh, it’s so simple-looking now…I just haven’t had the energy to come up with a gorgeous design.)