So busy...

Doing all the wrong things. While I am supposed to be focusing on my academics right now, I spent the last few days in a design induced spree--CSS'ing everything in my path. It all started with my multimedia class. I introduced XHTML and CSS this week--and I'm pretty happy with how everything went. Every student entered Thursday's class with a validated XHTML document--and most left with a pretty good understanding of how style sheets work. I'm working on a detailed tutorial, hopefully I'll publish somewhere external to my own site and Purdue. The tutorial is already 8 pages, and, yes, it took quite a bit of time to compose! My students turned this plain resume into this CSS formatted resume. I really blew through modifying list-styles, but Tuesday is another day. Up next, we're going to create a navigation section and turn a single page resume into a professional web presence... Actually, that's all a lie. It all started when I began redesiging my own website last week. I'm looking for something more inviting than what I have up there now (since I'm hitting the job market next year, I figure the dark and brooding intellectual isn't as attractive as the bright and inviting designer. I'm also trying to collect all my projects into a portfolio section. Looking at them together, I'm quite happy with how far my design skills have come in the past four years (four years ago I thought computers were the work of the devil--I've moved on). Moving on, I spent a full seven hours last night not writing my prospectus but rather redesigning a local association's website. No pics of this one, either, yet--but I am particularly pleased! I didn't really redesign the site, as much as reorganized material and perfectly recreated a complex, table and image based layout entirely in standards-compliant CSS. I did have to bend some semantic XHTML rules (creating two empty divisions for image borders), but I'll get over it. Not enough crazy web design coding fun? I just started the revision for the North American Levinas Association. The site will be particularly challenging becuase it has an incredible amount of content to convert and organize--a couple years worth of material, multiple navigation systems, etc. Oh, and did I mention that its all coded in frontpage and there is next to useless? Nothing like coding 100 link resource section from scratch... yum. I have a rough mock-up, but there's still significant work to do. At this point, I'm more interested in getting the content XHTML'd, the fine design points (read:reward) will come later. Screenshots, pics, links to all this stuff will come later. After I finish that prospectus (if I keep saying that, perhaps it will come true!)