You can go a long way with reading about .htaccess, HTTP protocol, or apache servers, but there comes a point where you would really like to have it explained by a talented teacher. In comes classroom video lectures from some top schools.

Here are some of my favorites:

AcademicEarth has a great web site that is full of great material covering a wide topic area. I have been using there computer science area to find some great video lectures on the basics of how the Internet works right on up to advanced programming. Look around in here and find some area your interested in, it’s a great way to kill a few hours days and learn something new.

From within AcademicEarth I found this web site from Harvard Extension School that is absolutely incredible! As of this post they have 5 classes online with video, lecture notes, slides, syllabus and source code. I am about half way through the “Building Dynamic Websites” course and it is incredible, I highly recommend it. Be sure to print out the lecture notes they are really helpful.

I have been learning a great deal from these lectures and they have made me want to be able to go back to a classroom setting. You really get so much more from a talented professor. Like I said print out the lecture notes and get your self a notebook and start learning. You can also print out the projects and try your hand at them.
Never Stop Learning!

The first post of 2010 has me working on a brand new project. Since I don’t have customers coming to me with requests and wants for there web site that challenge me and make me dig into the books to learn new skills, I challenged myself to come up with a whole new idea. This idea is not suppose to be my day job, or make me a millionaire, it’s about taking an idea from start to finish giving it a life on the web and learning the whole way.

Take an artistic idea develop it into something tangible, name it, buy the domain name, make a web site, get a twitter name, develop logo’s, all while pushing my limits in everything. This has had me sketching, thinking, designing and really thinking about so many different things than when I was making cliff538.com, all in all it has been a lot of fun.
I’ve brought the project live and am pretty happy with the results so far, PilotGraphs.com. The project is ongoing and I have many changes and ideas that will happen as the project grows and my skills develop with JavaScript.

I wanted to do something artistic that would put me into Photoshop but not to complex because I have zero artistic ability… and it needed to be something that I knew about. I have seen these simple graphs all around the web and they are really funny so I thought why not take my career as a pilot and make fun of aviation and the life of a crew-member. So the idea was born. Now I got to work sketching ideas, names, logos, and web page designs, this part of it I really enjoyed, working with a blank canvas and playing with designs until I hit on something that I really liked. I then searched the web to make sure I could get the domain name, twitter name, and wasn’t stealing some idea that was already out there and locked up the account names. I knew I wanted clean and simple, these are small simple funny graphs that speak entirely for themselves so I kept going back to a basic black and white design, single column, with a light-box effect for the graphs.

I’m very happy with where things are now and will continue to come up with new graphs when inspiration hits. I still have to work to do, the basic web design is there, but I want some hidden, pop-out navigation that won’t interfere at all with the clean feel. The footer needs work. I need to do a custom twitter background and many others are on the list. Bottom line it’s a lot of work and if your doing this for a living I respect the heck out of you! It’s a huge job and I can’t even imagine doing it on a big scale for a large company. It also becomes very clear why many people are involved in this kind of project, it’s really hard to be a jack-of-all-trades and do a really good job in every area that is required in a project like this. We have become very specialized in our skills, you have the front-end folks, back-end folks, design teams, user-interface experts, it’s amazing when it all comes together. I’m in awe when I look at a beautiful web site that is clean, easy to navigate and is focused.

Check out PilotGraphs and let me know what you think, then push yourself to come up with an idea and make a life for it. You might have fun and learn something in the process… it sure beats watching T.V.!
Never Stop Learning.

This week is a little about organization and a new WordPress Theme that is fairly new with some pretty impressive customization built-in and finally a blog that I think way overdoes the advertising.

I am really finding I need some organization to my learning, there is so much to learn I am bouncing around trying to tackle too much at one time. Between WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Photoshop, JQuery, MooTools I am spread too thin. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I enjoy the learning and the challenge of it all but I need to focus more in one area and make a list of priorities.

So, this upcoming week or so will be listing out my areas of focus and signing up for my next class over at O’Reilly School of Technology (one way for me to keep focused in one area is to take a class). I also want to make list of really good starting places to learn the basics. Since this blog is about my learning process into the web I thought I should list some good starting points above and beyond how I started out.

The new WordPress theme that looks interesting is Thesis Theme watch this video and it will show you some highlights of the theme. It looks interesting for somebody who doesn’t want to really learn a lot of CSS, HTML, and PHP. I think they are on to something with there more advanced customization controls, the theme cost $87 bucks for the lifetime. I am tempted to get it to just play as it might be a good learning tool…… going to think on that one for awhile.

Just a side note on good vs bad design, check out the blog of Lisa who did the video on the Thesis Theme. Lisa did a great job on the video but I think her blog/web site is an example of way too much advertising. I was brought into her web site by her video then by the name of her site, 2 create a web site, It has the look and feel of an infomercial. I clicked around looking for some good stuff to share with you but was incredibly put off with all the ads. The feel is that it’s more about making money than it is the quality of the content. The feel of her site drove me away not deeper into her site. I would think that great content brings more visitors which brings increased advertising rates. Just my opinion.

Have a great week and start learning something new!

One of the tutorials from the book “Layers”. This is the one that teaches shape layers and making custom shapes.

See if full size at my flickr site here.

This week has been full of playing with WordPress and tweaking my current theme. I see pro’s and con’s to working with a theme, the good is: that you have a fully functioning wordpress site up and running, you get to study somebody else’s CSS to see how they do things, and while your inside tweaking settings to your liking you get to see and interact with the PHP that wordpress is built on. The bad is: your dealing with somebody else’s way of doing things some of which you may not understand. I wanted to start with a very simple theme and dig into the source to see how it all worked and be able to customize the theme to match my current web site cliff538.com.

I started with minimalism 1.0.3 by Christian Genaehr and have been very happy with it. I’ve been able to structure things the way I want and have learned a lot by looking at how Christian set things up. Now that I’ve learned some I am anxious to make my own wordpress theme from scratch. I’m looking at some basic “wire frame” packages to help you get started and will be commenting later on which one I find works best.

This past week has also brought back my flow of working a few hours in Photoshop every other day or so. Building PS skills just takes time playing with the software. I usually am doing a tut (tutorial) from one of the many PS tut sites or playing with my own pictures to enhance or fix them. The current tut I am doing right now is here I am really liking this one, learned some new tricks and am hoping to incorporate it into my web site. I am always amazed at the power of PS.

Still have to dive deeper into JavaScript, have been doing some reading but I think I’m going to sign up for the JavaScript class over at O’Reilly School of Technology. The structure of it is good for me I think. I tend to jump around, with so much to learn in so many areas I spend just small amounts of time in each one and really need to slow down and focus on a smaller list. Which brings up the questions how much do you learn in each area? How much time do you spend in an area of learning? Which things should you focus on? Well, so much depends on what you want to accomplish, right? I am slowly starting to think that I will never be a programmer, the time involved in learning is monumental and I’m not even sure I have the smarts to figure it all out! Right now the goal is to just learn how to take somebody else’s programming and incorporate it or apply it to your own web site. Learning how to use and maybe slightly modify JavaScript and PHP for wordpress is huge in it’s own right. I have been playing with JQuery and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) there is a steep learning curve on how to implement these into your own site, I’ve been using my MAMP Web Server on my macbook pro and it’s been working great. If you haven’t set up a web server on your computer using MAMP give it a try it really is a time saver in experimenting and learning all this new stuff!

Well thats about it for this week, If your new to all of this and are just learning or your making your first web site drop me a note I’d love to check out your work and learn something from you!! back to my Photoshop tut……… Cheers!

A buddy of mine that I use to fly 747′s with has started a travel and cooking Web site.  He’s done a really nice job and his videos keep getting better and better. Travel around the world and explore great cusine…… Check it out!

Trailside Gourmet travel and cusine.

Very cool video of a Macworld Magazine Cover in the making

Time Lapse Cover Design For Macworld Magazine – slodive.

Here is some good info straight from the guys who know about Photoshop CS3 and Snow Leopard.  This is one of the drawbacks of progress….. Issues get heated when the software is expensive and not that old.  I can really see Adobe’s side as well, Apple is making a massive shift with Snow Leopard and Adobe is using it’s current resources to make CS4 work well.  Just because it wasn’t tested does not mean it will not work, we will see soon if there are any problems with CS3. My guess is Adobe will come through in the end and fix any problems (I hope…)

I’m running CS3 and will let you know if I have any problems with Snow Leopard

John Nack on Adobe: Adobe Snow Leopard FAQ.

This is the software that I have tried out so far and have really liked. A text editor is a really personal choice. If you take the O’Reilly course they have you use a built in text editor that works fine. But once you move beyond the course you will want to use a more powerful text editor, I have tried both the BBEdit and the TextMate editors and both have there strengths and weaknesses. They both will give you help with your HTML and CSS with built in palettes or autofill and when you move on to some PHP or other programming they have built in features for that too. Both come with a 30 day trial period so download both and give them a try. As far as FTP software, I have only used Expandrive and have not had any trouble, it works great. Update: I have been using the built-in FTP thats inside BBEdit and it has become my usual way to update files on the web server. I still think you need an external FTP program for general uploads of pictures, music, files, etc.

• TextMate Text Editor
• BBEdit Text Editor
• ExpanDrive FTP