A week off from College this week!

Well at college this week it was a bit of a rushed affair, as I could only stay for a couple of hours due to another engagement.


For the first part of the evening though, I eventually registered for the City & Guilds assessment so I can gain the qualification at the end of the course, as I’d previously not added that in, as I just wanted to gain an understanding of how web pages worked.

Now though, I have the Qualification to go with the course – if I pass the assessment that is – and that comes up shortly, as right now I’m doing the final piece of the course before the exam, and then it’s full swing into it!

Still working on an exercise right now, which is to compile a web page which contains links, and also frames, images, and general content – it all seems to be going okay, but it does get a little confusing with lots of these:
and lots of these
to contend with!

No college this week, as it’s half term, which for any US readers, is like recess for a week, so it’s a Thursday night in this week, but I’m planning to use it as a Study at home night again, so I can try to go through all the exercises I’ve previously done again, and get a bit quicker, but also try to get those attributes stuck in to my head!

Almost there!

Yes, believe it or not, I'm not far off going for the final assessment now in the course that I'm doing, which is the Web Page Design City & Guilds.

At last week's course on the Thursday night, it was full concentration, as I finished off the Animated Gifs exercise that I was stopped in my tracks doing whilst on the catch up night.

So, that done, I thought I'd actually finished, but was relieved to see another exercise to do, which is quite solid, and involves a lot of the attributes that I've been learning about throughout the course, but it's not quite in there just yet, and I did struggle trying this.

In fact it took me a large part of the night to get through, and still didn't get it completed, so it came home with me for some further research which I'm planning to do right after this blog is typed up!

Back on Thursday for Week 6 and this is the last one for 2 weeks, thanks to a break in term, so maybe, just maybe I can get to the end of the exercises, and plan for the final assessment1

Here's hoping hey!

Catch Up Night!

Last night I made myself have a "College at Home" night, as I caught up with where I'd left off at last week's session, which I had to leave early due to sickness.

I had quite a frustrating night creating Buttons with Microsoft Paint, for some reason my PC didn't quite like what I was trying to do, but I got there in the end, which is just as well, as the exercise features in the end assessment where you have to build a website, so I had to get this right.

It was one of those though, you know where you keep on getting frustrated, and it doesn't seem to be working no matter what I tried, but in the end it clicked.

Following that lengthy exercise, I then moved on to Animated Gifs, and had spent a long time creating what appeared to be a wheel animation, but when it actually came down to the final part, I need to use the network at the College, as it has Microsoft Animator, so I'll need to try my workings there.

So, that's as far as I got last night, with about 3 hours spent on it, which is about right after last week, and it's back to College I go tonight for another 3 and a half hours to hopefully get to the next stage.

Sickness forces pull out of course!

Despite the headline, it's not all over, but for one week only, I had to leave the course after only 1 hour sitting in the room.

The course is three and a half hours each Thursday night, but last week, with the way I was feeling, and you know what I mean if you read my "man flu" blog the other day, it was npt good, sitting there about 200 degrees, eyes looking like a road map, and my head pounding like a drum, there was no way it was going to let me concentrate on the week's work in the course.

With about 45 minutes of being there, I went into a sneezing fit, and that was the final straw, I couldn't be there any longer, but I did manage to complete a few things, which were:

• Frames
• Linking Between Frames
• Inserting Java Applets

The Frames piece was a tad confusing, as it included terms like Framesets, and Frames within Framesets, so it did get a bit difficult to understand at one stage, and then linking between frames was just as challenging to follow!

Finally, learning how to insert the Java Applets, this was good to see, as Blogger obviously uses a few of these, and it was good to relate things back to this, which can only help on the course.

That was that though, and I pulled out of the evening's session due to sickness, but the good thing is you can take work home with you, and so I picked up the next three workbooks which cover:

• Creating a Button Using Microsoft Paint
• Animated Gifs
• Signing up for Free Web Space
• Royalty-free Images
• Jpeg file compression

The plan is to have my extra session "at home" on Wednesday night, so I'll update once I have that before returning to college on Thursday evening.

It still all feels worthwhile, and when the lecturer said that I was ahead of where I should be last week, then that was a comforting thought with me feeling ill!

That's it for today then!

Three Down, Seven to Go!

Well I've just realised that I hadn't updated this blog, having completed the third week of my course in Web Page Design, so here goes!

Week Three was a bit of a challenge, not least as I was tired going into the college that night, after what seemed a long working day, it wasn't particularly a long day, but so much crammed into the day, and I didn't have a great night's sleep the night before, so that didn't help either!

So, into college I went, and into the class, I tried to get there early, so I could get cracking, which I did, and this week, I kicked off learning about Lists and how to build an ordered list & unordered list to start off with, so I could find out how to have lists with numbers, and also roman numerals, then moving onto nested lists which combined both.

Having completed the exercise in that workbook, it was time to move on to using Tables in web pages, and this was certainly a bulky part of the workbook, with different subjects covering:

• Size of the tables,
• Borders,
• Positioning data within a cell,
• Multiple cells & rows,
• How to centre a table on a page,
• Controlling space in and around cells,

Then completing an exercise on that, which also included adding colour to the table.

Having completed that, and it did take me a while to complete it, it was time to move on to Spanning a cell across columns & rows, this included two or three exercises, which again took up most of my time, and unfortunately by the end of this part, my eyes had just had it!

So, I upped and left half an hour prior to the end of the scheduled finishing time, something you are obviously free to do as an adult doing night school, it feels weird, as you still feel like asking the teacher if you can leave early, like you would of had to do had you been at school, only at school, the teacher would have refused your request point blank, so it's nice to have the freedom at this stage in life!!

So, on my way out, and perhaps as I was feeling sort of guilty at leaving early, I picked up the next couple of workbooks, which I'm going to work on tonight, before heading back to college tomorrow.

The next two sections being Frames & Linking Frames, so hopefully I'll know a bit more about those by the time the morning comes round!!!

That's it for tonight, I'll post another update for Week 4 in a couple of days time.