Wikispaces and blogger

You know I think my general theme for the blogs is complaining about technology, I try not to really but I always seem to have something to say.

I spent some time today adding some things to the wiki. I wanted to add a table because I had some information that would look nice in one. I used the table function on wikispaces, it was super easy, but then when I saved it and looked at the page the table looked horrible. First you can't get rid of the light grey table lines and for some reason even if there is plenty of space between the columns and the text it all gets squeezed together so all the text is right next to the lines. It was so frustrating.

I then spent some time finding some simple html codes that might work on the page. I found one for a table that I thought might look better than the one on wikispaces. However I could not find how to to html codes in the edit feature. So 30 minutes of me playing with every edit tool I googled html codes and wikispaces. I found out to add html you have to click on the widgets and click other html. You can then add in your code there. It was so simple when I finally found it.


On a side note, I'm so happy blogger has an automatic save function. A few years ago I went to Michigan and spent about an hour typing out a nice trip account. When I went to go post the blog, blogger decided it wanted to die and my blog went poof into thin air. I was so incredibly angry and I think I finally rewrote it but it was not nearly as long. That is why every post I wrote after that (I do still do it on blogger anyway and on oncourse too) I hit ctrl-A, ctrl-C so I could pull it back up if I have to.

If anyone has any tips on adding tables to wikispaces and making them look nice let me know.

Blog posting #6

After spending a lot of last week worrying about the wiki I am feeling better this week. I created a very simple sample wiki just to see how it works. I played around with the navigation and adding photos. It seems somewhat easy and pretty self explanatory. Although I guess Steve had problem with the way the navigation looked on the wiki. I’m not sure how crazy you can get using Wikispaces, plus I don’t really have too much HTML coding knowledge so I don’t know if that can be fixed.

Marcella and I found some really neat things to add from other wikis. We like a feature from bubble share that uses a photo slideshow. I played around with that website a little tonight and it looks really neat. I like the special features you can add around the pictures (although they seem cutesy and would not fit into our wiki at all). I even saw the FFA photos that were uploaded on the community page.

On wikispaces I checked out the widgets that could be added, but I could not figure out how to really add anything. They all lead to outside sites so I don't know if I have to set something up on that site first. I tried placing a calendar in just to see if it would work but it didn't. That is something I will have to look into and play around to see what I have to do to make them work. I have not heard of any the websites (Odeo, Bitty, Scribd-are they really words??). It would be good to look at the websites and see what they do so maybe I could use them in the future.

Blog # 5

Let me start off by saying I'm really sick so this blog may make no sense :(

On Monday the network at the library I work at was completely wiped out. No one could print, get on the internet (unless they were already on it for some reason) for a pretty long time. Needless to say chaos happened. Students had papers due and couldn't print them and well they couldn't look up their myspace pages either. It was down on the whole campus not just the library. Students look at you like it's your fault that it's down. It came back up and it was like nothing happened. Our tech person had to sign a few papers for professor's explaining the printers were down so that is why the student could not turn in there paper on time. Craziness. Last semester we lost our catalog for a few hours which was a super pain, but at least we could look up books and items on Worldcat.

Onto the wiki. I was a little overwhelmed last week. I am more worried than anything that I have no clue how to make a wiki from scratch. I'm sure once I start making it I will feel better. It just seems like A LOT to do and with only two people in the group makes me worry. One of my worries was not being able to please the client. It should all work out I just need to stop worrying.

Oh and

YYYHAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY EVERYONE!!YYY

Gliffy and cell phone problems

The Case Study has been really difficult for me. I knew what I wanted to say but I have had problems getting it on paper as a diagram without lines pointing in every direction (this happened on my second graph on my rough draft to which I received an 'Oh my God' from my brother, after that I assumed I needed to change it :). I finally completed something that looked decent using Word. I had looked at gliffy.com but was a little apprehensive to use it. I played with it a little tonight and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use. I made my graphs in half the time it took to make them using Word and they looked really nice.


Last Friday night I tried dialing on my cell phone and there was nothing on the other end-no attempt to make the call. All I thought was 'what now.' I called my boyfriend on my house phone (something I rarely use) to see if he had tried to call me. He said he did and it went right to my voice mail. At this point I was freaking out because I had dropped my phone at work a few days before on the nice hard floor so I thought it was broke. But I checked my parent's phones and their phones did not work either.

Saturday was still much of the same; my mom called Verizon to find out the tower in my area was out. However the Verizon person said if we had updated our phones (you are supposed to dial *228 every so often) we probably would have been able to go off another tower. Umm yeah I didn't know I was supposed to update my phone. Maybe I'm the only one.

The phone was down all day Saturday but by the time I woke up on Sunday it was working again. It was not that much of problem for me because if I needed to use a phone I have my house phone. I do however have a few friends who do not have a house phone, just their cell. Someone like this would have not had a phone for a over a day.

So all in all I found a new piece of technology I enjoyed but also had some technology problems this week.