Dr Karl Stolley
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication, Illinois Institute of Technology
Recent Notes
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One of the strangest bits of cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced lately is being unable to genuinely use the first-person singular pronoun “I” on a course website that’s a wiki. It just doesn’t make any sense to...and I’m probably the last person to recognize this w/r/t wikis.
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My course wikis are almost set up. And it occurs to me that the Wikka Wiki software’s support for Geshi is going to make sharing in-class code examples a snap.
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Moving sites around from server to server is enough to help anyone see more clearly how and why Web sites can always stand to be built in an ever-more portable fashion.
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Suddenly it occurs to me that so-called “div-itis"--where web writers use tons of div tags instead of structural header or list tags--is probably caused, in part, by the fact that web browsers apply no default styling to those blocks. That, in turn, takes the guesswork out of styling. Of course, a reset CSS file is a much better option all around.
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The limited view of technology as a tool and a tool only is just never going to go away.
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I am so irritated that RPI’s June 11 Webcast about the future of the Web (starring Tim Berners-Lee) requires the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. Wow. How future-oriented. Another piece of proprietary software technology.
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To read: an article in Book Forum called “Uncreative Writing.” Recommended by J.Snap.
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To read: John Muckelbauer’s The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (recommended by Kelly P).
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To rework JFK a bit: “Ask not what your Web application can do for you; ask what you can do with your application."
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The less design, the less to eventually get sick of.
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I just discovered that Firefox allows you to drag tabs between different windows; although it copies the tab and reloads the page, rather than just removing it from the original window, this is still really handy for organizing. (I always have at least two FF windows open and half a dozen tabs in each window, and usually one window on each of my two monitors. I know, it’s kind of sick.)
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Google Prettify’s claim that it won’t interfere with embedded tags in code examples appears incorrect; if the code example is only HTML, Prettify will remove any embedded tags (like a strong tag used to highlight a code change). Adding non-HTML code to the sample allows the tags to remain, but the expected rendering of HTML code elements disappears, too.
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Is a possible activity-theory based critique of WYSIWYG digital production that WYSIWYG takes what, at the code level, would be actions and moves them down, outside of a human agent, to the level of operations? And that making so many actions (e.g., bolding text) into operations shared across, say, a Web editor and a Word processor, clouds the entire idea of the activity of digital production?
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I enjoy my Kinesis keyboards, especially because they are such conversation pieces.
The Kinesis Advantage: An abstract view.
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New Media, Old(er) Media alert: why is there such a disconnect between the compelling election primary graphics on broadcast CNN, versus the paltry offerings on CNN.com?
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The number of organizations named kairos that use some sort of time piece—a sundial, a clock face, a pocket watch—as their logo is astounding. Especially given that these devices are all rooted in chronos.
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When using the UNION syntax in MySQL, it is essential that the order of fields in subsequent SELECT statements match the order (and number) in the first statement.
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This is a dummy code snippit to test the Google prettify script:
/*Treat this as a comment*/ function but() { $this = "live code"; } -
Added the Cite extension to the MediaWiki installation for COM542.
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It’s possible to leverage CSS to make radio buttons and check boxes scale in Firefox (elsewhere?) with text by setting the width and height attributes in ems, selected by the unique ID of the form element, e.g.,
input#my-radio-button { height: 1em; width: 1em; }. Alternatively, use the fancy (but unevenly supported)input[type=radio]selector. -
Open Document Type (.odt) files produced by OOo are in fact little archives of files that can be unzipped and examined...at your own risk.
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I just noticed that Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar scrolls back to the top of a page when using Edit CSS on embedded CSS. Editing a linked (and perhaps imported?) stylesheet does not affect the scrolled position on a page.
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Somehow I managed to forget that right-aligning a relatively positioned element in CSS is easily achieved with a fixed width and margin-left: auto;
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I was surprised to see today that MSNBC.com is now using a Flash-based video player, abandoning the use of Windows Media Player. Not sure how long this has been going on; I only checked it today out of curiosity. “YouTube Effect,” maybe?
Archive of Notes
About Me
I’m an assistant professor of technical communication at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL. I completed my PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2007.
This fall, I am teaching graduate seminars in Information Structure and Retrieval, and Open Source in Technical Communication.
On Twitter: Exhausted from a long week, but nerding out over the new iPhone enhancements c/o today's software update.