Week 1-
Day 1 Friday 15thJanuary 1999
Those people from TRACE Sue Thomas
Director Carolyn
Bamborough
Web Administrator
they should have known better: they should have asked for a reference. I had only been in the building for an hour when I committed the first 'Penfold'. My colleagues would have warned them about the numerous little accidents which attach themselves to Margaret Penfold. They could have cited: Pouring custard into a bottomless jug at school camp; Setting fire to a fortune-teller's tent at a fete (I was too enthusiastic when creating the atmospheric smoke); Sticking the notice 'Toilets' on to the chapel door in a WRVS Emergency Rest Centre (there was an arrow pointing onwards but no one noticed. Luckily, it was only an exercise).
Today's 'Penfold' involved ramming a floppy into the mouth of the zip drive. There were, I insist, extenuating circumstances: On my own computer, the zip drive is at the bottom, not the top, and I was busy talking. They were all very nice about it. I did try to retrieve the floppy, but as I pulled a pair of tweezers from my bag, there was a panicky cry from the previously phlegmatic Phil Wane. Apparently, inserting a metal object into a disk drive will ruin its magnetism.
I could be doing TRACE an injustice when I implied they were lax in allowing me into the building: the offices are scheduled for demolition. Perhaps the university authorities thought that I would do the job cheaper than the professionals.
So what did I learn today, apart from the facts that floppies can enter a zip drive but cannot leave it, and that one must not poke metal into the mouths of disk drives?
To start with, Carolyn showed me how to download an ftp application in order to upload my journal files to the TRACE server. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Protocol here means - a set of rules governing the transmission of data between two computers which cannot communicate directly)
Philip Wane came in to diagnose my learning needs. My first lesson with him was on how to how to use Hotmail. I quickly discovered that receiving post by Hotmail could prove somewhat erratic. When I am at home I will stick to my regular ISP's, but I appreciate that it will be useful when away from my own telephone.
Left unguarded for a while, I experimented with the chat line on CommunityWare to send a message that disrupted Sue Thomas while she was on-line. Chat lines I usually ignore as I don't like paying out money to BT for something that is reminiscent of the telegraph messages of my childhood . I can see, however, that if I organised a set time with relatives abroad Chat could save money on trunk calls. I must investigate modern audio software.
I suspect that the administrators and I have different agendas. They would like to demonstrate that a stereotypical ‘all thumbs, no fingers’ character can make enormous technical strides in three months. I, however, hope that proximity to good writers can infect me with the dual talents of 'showing, not telling' and 'in depth characterisation'. It will be interesting to see which of us achieve our aims.
Day 2 Saturday 16th January 1999
I put day1 onto the net using the same ftp application Carolyn and I downloaded from TuCows. It iscalled WS_FTP95 LE. I have had it on my machine at home since August and have been able to use it with one of my servers Actinet by following the excellent instructions theysent me for that particular application. I have been ftping into and out of Actinet for several months now , but could not get WS_FTP95 LE to upload to my other ISP. Working with Carolyn Bamborough to make use of it with trace.ntu.ac.uk showed me the general principals behind Actinet's specific instructions so now I can both insert files into and delete files from all my web pages. WS_FTP95 LE is free to homeusers and students but I suspect business people have to use the commercial pro version.
Day 3 Sunday 17th January 1999
I spoke to Sue and Helen Whitehead during the regular trAce chat line today. Here in the UK the timing for this chat is at Sundays at 9 p.m, a useful time for UK customers as BT telephone rates are at their lowest at the week-ends. Not many people join in on Sundays. Is the Wednesday one more popular? I haven't been able to join in that because I am on a writing course at that time. We talked about Kids on the Net and the new co-operative story about monsters. Sue pointed out a typo on the title page of this journal. As I had incorporated that text into a graphic I will have to do quite a lot of work in order to to change it.
I originally produced the graphic in Paintshop pro 5, imported into Publisher , added a text box, grouped the graphic and the text box exported it back to Paintshop pro and saved it as a GIF file. (It is possible to put text directly into paintshop Pro I know but I have not yet found out how to contol the position and rotation.) I
Since my visit the trAce offices last week I have stayed up until 2.30 a.m. each night creating web pages and using my ftp application. No excuse now for not updating the old pages I uploaded using Microsoft Publisher 97.
Publisher 97 uploads all the files for a site every time it updates. There is no possibility of looking through the site and deleting the odd one or two, nor of knowing if there are redundant files on the site. Publisher is a fine tool for someone who has no intention of messing with HTML and wants to produce a static type of page.. It achieves pleasing instant effects and places text and graphics anywhere on the screen. It is easy to hyperlink from one file to another but I could not find a way to insert hypertext links within pages. Oddly while bookmarks are available in the DTP part of the package they seem to be absent from the web creation pages. Perhaps someone can tell me if that deficiency has been overcome in the latest version of Publisher.
I am now using Front Page which makes inserting hyperlinks easy but designing one's own layout far more difficult. It is certainly useful to understand how to insert metatags. Like Publisher, Front Page comes with its own publishing tools but I have not yet used them because I have been playing with WS_FTP95 LE.
Spent the morning at trAce offices mainly looking at Kids on the Net. The Monster story is taking off. Have your children/ grandchildren added their bits yet? In the afternoon I looked up background material for my novels and became immersed in the famous Jewish women series on an Israeli Postage stamp series. Don't know that I can use the material in any novel though.