My classes start on the 13th. I’m updating one syllabus and writing another one from scratch.
I have tweaked my explanation of the rules (PDF) for “Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation,” an unconventional assignment that I blogged about earlier. I’ll be having my students play Ivanhoe in my Spring section of Introduction to British Literature, 1
If you were a student, would this make sense to you? What might seem unclear? What questions would you have?
Admiring the new color scheme over at WeezBlog and working on setting up course blogs for next semester (with frequent stupid questions sent Liz Lawley‘s way), I’m remembering that back in the days of the browser-safe color palette, Lynda Weinman had a book called Coloring Web Graphics that included page after glossy page of sample website designs with color codes for the creatively lazy. If you liked a particular design, it was easy to just adopt the colors for your own purposes.
Does anything like that exist out on the web? (He asked without bothering to google first.)
…because a late night of karaoke meant I spent today in low-watt mode. But I’ve been working on getting Liz Lawley’s MT Courseware set-up to work on my teaching installation of MT. Still have kinks to work out (I’m pretty sure the kinks are on my end, somehow), and coding/tagging always seems to keep me up later than I intend.
Earlier, I made some good progress on revising syllabi for the upcoming semester, including refining my use of the game Ivanhoe, something I wrote about earlier.
We were also fortunate enough today to catch the Marsden Hartley (images via google) exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I had seen his painting entitled “Christ Held by Half-Naked Men” (1940-1941) at the Hirshhorn in D.C., but I was unfamiliar with his larger body of work, which is quite varied.
Finally, I continued to tweak this blog’s layout. Thanks to Jason for reminding me to check out the CSS provided by Blue Robot and to Eric Sigler for the pointer to MTSimpleComments.
There are still kinks, but I’m just too pooped right now to figure them all out.
Obviously I’m still trying some things with the style sheet. Bear with me.
I switched back to a 2-column layout. If you are experiencing any weirdness in how it displays (e.g. on Mac’s), please let me know. Include your OS version and your browser version. Thanks!
Update: Other things I’m trying to achieve include changing “recent comments” on the main page to “recent comments and trackbacks” (any tips on how to do that?), using the “categories” function, and using a drop-down for the categories and archive months. Yes, I’m just stealing features from some of my favorite blogs. Oh, I’d also like to enable limited HTML in the comments, but I’m unsure how to do that. I know I could read around on the web and figure it out for myself, but I’ll start with the lazy approach: can anyone point me in the right direction?