Reading

The texts in this class serve several purposes: to provide you with the background in several areas that might be unfamiliar to historians, and to furnish you with a modest web design and development library. A typical class will involve around an hour of discussing the readings for that particular week, an hour of lecture/presentation about a particular design/development topic, and an hour of practical exploration. Times and occurrences of these three will vary, but the structure will almost always be the same. The readings assigned for a particular class will almost always related to the applied portion of that class, so come prepared to not only discuss the reading material, but also to use the material in the class practicum.

In addition to assigned books and articles, I also ask that you pay attention to the “journals” of web design and development. Just as historians regularly read academic journals like the Journal of American History or The American Historical Review, professional web designers and developers also have professional publications that they regularly read and contribute to. You can download this OPML file to automatically add import these RSS feeds to your newsreader.

• A List Apart
• Digital-Web Magazine
• Vitamin
• Boxes and Arrows

For inspiration, I recommend subscribing to a few design galleries:

• CSS Beauty
• CSS Mania
• Unmatched Style
• DesignSnips
• PatternTap

In addition to the required texts, I have provided a list of additional reading relevant to each topic we cover. Feel free to read as much of this before class as you wish. These are all publications that I have used in my own work, and have found them invaluable. We won’t be able to cover every aspect of a given topic, so if you’d like to explore a particular topic further, this list should help.

Writing

You are required to create and maintain a weblog through the course. Specifics about blog assignments are covered in the Work section. I recommend WordPress.com for hosted blogging, or downloading and installing WordPress on your own server (which we’ll do this semester) but other options are available. Please add the URL to your blog to your user profile on the course site by February 2.

Software, Hardware, Hosting

Since this course uses computers and the Internet extensively, familiarity with both is essential. If you do not have internet service, please obtain it at the earliest available moment and become comfortable with the software and protocols. Although the university does not require the purchase of a computer, I would encourage you to consider the investment. You might find a laptop handy if you are accustomed to a particular OS and web editor. Because of the nature of the course, you cannot depend on the university’s public clusters or the availability of software for all assignments. Your enrollment in the course indicates your interest in computerish things, and your tool set should reflect that interest.

Standards-based design is, on the whole, much more tractable than its predecessor, convoluted table-based design. Semantic HTML is much easier to write, but Internet browsers carry the baggage of the Browser Wars and, as result, render pages styled with CSS differently. As any experienced web design and developer can attest, you will need several browsers to test your web work. For Macintosh, you’ll need Firefox 3, Safari, and Opera. For Windows, you will need to test on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 6. While IE 7 is rapidly replacing IE 6 on Windows machines, IE 6 still has a significant market share, so testing on it is required.

You will need access to an image editing program. For those who envision using new media as an ongoing part of their history graduate work, Adobe Photoshop is the de facto standard, and the software we’ll use in class. For those who see their new media work as occasional, Adobe Photoshop Elements (5.0 for Wintel and 4.0 for Mac) is an extremely powerful (and inexpensive) program that, except for some advanced color capabilities, has the same features as Photoshop CS2.

A good text editor is also a must. Adobe Dreamweaver is a good option (and is the one installed in the lab), but there are many text editor applications. Mac folks, for instance, can use Textmate, BBEdit, or Coda, among others. But remember: this class does not focus on a particular piece of software for web development; It focuses on how to write clean, semantic code. I can try my best to help troubleshoot software questions in and out of class, but you should rely primarily on the software’s documentation and company for support.

This class also requires access to web hosting that has, at minimum, PHP5 and MySQL5. Good web hosting is incredibly cheap: Dreamhost, for instance, provides a variety of plans that, after paying upfront for a year, end up costing $10/month. If you decide to go this route, consider teaming up with classmates to share an account and divide costs. Alternatively, I can provide free access to the Omeka dev server. This would include your own folder, username, and MySQL database. With this option, however, you work will be wiped at the end of the semester. (I can provide a zip of your folder’s contents and database.) I highly recommend getting your own server space to host your own blog/website and develop any digital history work beyond this course.

An FTP program is also necessary to transfer files from your computer to your server. GMU ITU Support Center provides a free download of Secure Shell for Windows. Free options for Macintosh include CyberDuck and Fugu. I prefer an inexpensive program called Transmit