Why it matters
Learning Aesthetics has a new look; basic would be a bit of an understatement. It’s the beginning of an experiment. A bit of background:
Philosophy: One of the original intents of the site was to provide a channel for online conversation and exchange among the members of the SU community. However, we discovered that the community wasn’t singular, but rather a number of individual communities. Further it appears that the members of these communities are you might say ‘way busy’ with what they are already doing. We’ve been trying to figure out what we could contribute, how we could be useful, and this is what we’ve come up with. If the web is as David Weinberger maintains is simply Small Pieces Loosely Joined the challenge is connecting not creating. In the Web 2.0 world the startup process has been described as, “Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks;” inter-media reference, “Business plan? We ain’t got no business plan. We don’t need no business plan! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ business plan!!” Which is to say we have eliminated the notion that we need a plan of any type; think of LA as an evolutionary process.
What You’ll Find Here: News about what’s happening in various corners of the University regarding learning and technology. Items and pointers to discussions from the larger world that seem one way or another related or important. Brief reviews of tools that might be useful, and meditations on what it means to live online as well as off.
Code Theory: Your Current Correspondent doesn’t actually have Geek credentials, the said CC does have some impressive backup. Rather than simply presenting a blog/web-site/online-presence we’re going to run some commentary on how and why we’re doing it. That will involve some tech jargon and maybe even some code samples, by way of example:
The Learning Aesthetics is currently running on a WordPress blog engine. One of the implications of this is that the ‘look’ of the site is controlled by a theme. There are several hundred, that may well be an understatement, free WordPress themes available and many of them are quite beautiful. Currently we are running the Sandbox Theme and in the CC’s opinion most folks won’t find it what they would think of as ‘beautiful’. However, as the Sandbox name implies it’s designed to be played with and that’s what we’ll be doing. We’ll be implementing a theme-switcher plug-in later so you’ll be able to step back in time and see how things developed. Here’s more description from their site:
The Sandbox is a lot of things:
• Beautiful on the inside
• For WordPress 2.0.x and 2.3.x+
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Widgets plugin-friendly
• The basis for your new, GPL-licensed theme
The real feature of the Sandbox is its markup. The use of class-generating functions in the body, post div, and comment/trackback li elements create an exceptionally extensible foundation. As Andy said, Given straightforward markup with plenty of selectors, there isn’t much that can’t be accomplished with CSS and a decent browser.
