Second Class of MTU

If you missed our first class, you can read up and watch the video here.

We completed the second class of Metal Toad University last Thursday. It focused on tools that we'll use to create sites including text editors and graphics programs, and then we went down a list of HTML elements and talked about each one. Well, most of them. We skipped the blink tag and a few others.

This class wasn't as interesting as the first one in my opinion, but hey, we're learning too. After the class I was given a lot of good feedback on how that material can be presented in a better way to get more retention and I'll be incorporating that feedback into future lessons. Ultimately, my goal is to have these next couple classes form the foundation for what we'll be doing later on. If none of what we talked about in this last class stuck, don't sweat it. It will make a lot more sense once we actually get in and start building some things.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Figure it out - Part of this profession is figuring things out. If you haven't added me on Google+ yet (dan@backflipdigital.com is my personal email address), figure it out :)
• No Windows - If you have a windows laptop, let me know and we'll get you set up with a linux install. This will become pretty important as we move forward. You can insist on Windows if you like, but you won't be able to ask for help with it when it goes bonkers.
• 2 hours - There was some initial confusion over how long the class would go. We played it by ear the first night and although we ending up losing some people after the hour mark, it's been generally agreed that one hour simply goes too fast. From now on, we'll start at 6, take a break around 7 and end around 8. These are still soft times as I'd hate to stop in the middle of a topic because 'the bell rang'.
• Timeliness - This is a casual course, but from now on we'll be starting promptly at 6. This isn't to punish anyone who comes late, but it's not fair to make the people who show up on time wait for the stragglers.

I'm really looking forward to the next class as we'll be introducing CSS and styling your web pages. We'll spend about 10 minutes setting up a base HTML document, then we'll get to styling it. The class after that will introduce JavaScript. Once these three key concepts have had a class devoted to them, we'll start getting into some really meaty stuff. Stay tuned!

Here's the video from last week: