Web Dev Chronicles

Updated: the Domain name, email, hosting course date is now May 14th.

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I've been working on this for awhile but things are finally scheduled and coming together. Currently 2 of the 4 courses I have planned are scheduled at the Rich Media Institute.

On May 14th is Domain Names, Email & Hosting: How to get control of your web presence. I'm regularly coming across freelances, cultural workers, artists, grandparents, teens and plenty of other individuals or small companies who want to get online but don't know where to start. Sometimes they just want personalized email addresses, or a one page website. Sometimes they have a great domain name they don't yet know what to do with. Other times they want a blog for their website or personal interests. Other times they are planning a site and approaching a company to do the work, or maybe already have a site but don't really know anything about how it got there. This course is for all these people. 

In this day and age it's important for your business or even your personal presence to understand how it is that http://egnaro.com brings you to this website and how the content you are viewing gets into your browser. Or how do I get my egnaro.com email addresses? I've dealt with two many companies looking for a new or updated website but all the info about this stuff was in the hands of their old developers or the hosts that those developers setup for them. My belief is that this stuff isn't that hard and is better off in the hands of the owner. I'll show you easy ways to get control of your presence online.

On April 2nd is Getting Your Images Online. This ones a little different. Ever received an email from someone with ten 2MB photos of their kids attached? Ever sent one of these emails? Or maybe you're an amatuer photographer and you want to put your images online. What's this Flickr thing all about? How can I set up my own portfolio site or photo blog? What about all those different formats and settings and things, what are they all about? Maybe you work in an office that got a fancy new content management system and it's your job to maintain the site content. But you keep getting emails about how slowly the photos on site load. You should definitely come to this workshop, I'll make you the saviour of the website rather than the brunt of angst and grief from others!

I'll explain some of the basics about images. Help you come to grips with terminology like resolution and dpi. Then I'll run through a bunch of tools and workflows to help you do some basic corrections and organization. We'll finish with ways to actually get those photos on the web for the world to see.

If you're particularly interested in having your own photo blog or online gallery I'd suggest coming to the first workshop as well.

Some time after these are done I'm going to do a workshop on setting up and using Google Apps for your personal or business use. The first course is also a suggest pre-requisite for this. I'll finish with a workshop on using all of Google's other tools to make your website the king of the hill. This workshop will include information I've learned from setting up my own Google Mini server to index nowtoronto.com. 

If you are going to sign up for these, use the discount code 'mason' to get 10% off.