Let me tell you a bit about myself. My name is David Curtis, and I am currently pursuing a Master of Arts Degree in Written Communications with an emphasis in The Teaching of Writing.
Before coming to Eastern Michigan, I taught
high school English in
California for ten years. Prior to that, I obtained a Bachelor's Degree
in English from the University of Central Oklahoma, the state in which
I was born. I hope to complete the MA in the Summer semester of 2004.
My Website
Development Adventures
Upon taking this
class, for the first time in my life, I embarked on the development of
a website, a relatively difficult project for a neophyte like me.
However, I must admit, I have been both intrigued and challenged by it
even though, when I started this project, I possessed no memory of the
procedures to bring into existence a website worth peering at.
It all started
with a classroom lab session in which Dr. Krause led us (the class)
through a step-by-step demonstration of how to build a website using a
McIntosh. I had never before played with a McIntosh; in the past,
I had always used a personal computer, so I felt somewhat awkward at
first clicking on commands and icons and obtaining unexpected pages as
a result. Therefore, simply getting used to using the McIntosh
was one of the first hurdles I faced. When Dr. Krause asked the
class to click on something in particular, I usually couldn't find it,
so I just sat there clicking away, trying to accidentally discover the
right button. When I finally found the right button, I noticed by
quickly reviewing the computer screens of my classmates that I had
fallen behind. Having noticed this, Dr. Krause came over to
provide me some assitance allowing me to catch up and move on.
During the Krause
demonstration, I learned about a fish (software) that helps
connect webpages to EMU's web server and how to create a web page using
important HTML symbols.
Creating a web
page turned out to be quite simple. The HTML symbolse were easy
to use in Notepad as I began to compose biographical data for this web
site. I also found the image above on the internet and tried to
put it in Notepad, but on my first and second attempts, it didn't work.
I put the image in a file and tried to retrieve it, and Notepad
accepted it the third time.
With a biography
and an image in place, I was ready to transfer the file to the internet
using Filezilla, which then requested my EMU username and password, so
I quickly put them in the box. At that point, I proceeded to open
up My Documents where I had saved the Notepad file. I dragged it to the
EMU server. It worked!
Later, when I
added color to this web page, I used Mozilla's Composer. However,
I made a big mistake when I tried to publish the file through
Composer. Dr. Krause later told me I could publish the new file
only through Filezilla. Therefore, I saved the Composer file in
My Documents and then retrieved it in Filezilla where I published it .
Links to
English 516 Completed Assignments