Unit 11 - Course Retrospective

All the nuts and bolts finally got put into place to put a web server online, create a database, host it online, and make the information retrievable with the power of PHP & MySQL queries. Technical aspects aside, my feelings toward digital collections went from "it would be great if I could" to "now I can actually put a searchable database out on the web." I don't think that my perspective on digital collections has changed, because my goals for information sharing are still the same. I am still moved by the same cultural projects that communities gather and put online to educate themselves and others. If my perspective has changed somewhere it would be with the power of open source software and the role it can play in similar projects.

Unit 10 - MySQL

I thought that MySQL was easier to learn than some other concepts presented in the course, because it is human readable. "Select photographer_lname from photographers" is not very cryptic. Even getting into some of the commands such as joining tables, order by, where like %, and counting are still understandable. It does take some practice to see how these operators work together and to practice writing well formed queries without mistakes, but overall this was unproblematic. In fact, this is the point in the course where I began to feel that there was some power within my keystrokes. I could write a table, write a query, and see the fruits of my labors in the results. Finally, I was creating information and asking the program to find patterns in the data.

Unit 8 - Technology Planning

During these readings, I was not surprised by the lack of effective planning in technology industry especially to do with software development, because I have read about this for some other courses. But what I was tickled to learn which I did not know was that more projects fail for running overtime than for running over budget. There seems to be a culture of "just do it" in the technology field with a minority of companies that weave an effective "let's plan it!" into the project. But we should all know by now that spending ten percent of our project time making a blueprint for a house will save use ten times the reworking pain when the home does not meet homebuyer's requirements or construction code, heck the chimney went in the bathroom! Doers have a reputation for being great at doing, but must be convinced that planning now is not a waste of time, but a time saver later when the work does not have to be reworked. My friend is experiencing this right now, because no one thought the project warranted a plan. Now, team members are learning that they have very different ideas about the basic goals of the project and how it is supposed to look. Rather than defining goals, they have been assigned tasks and milestones (all well and good), but when they reach those milestones, the manager discovers the work is not what was desired and the vicious cycle continues.

Unit 7 - XML and hosting

The w3schools tutorials are very helpful to me and usually give enough information to get started. I prefer a textual tutorial rather than pausing a video, rewinding it, and listening over again if I was unclear. The textual guides let me read/learn at my pace rather than the pace of the speaker. This was my first experience with XML and it showed me just how flexible it is. Rather than being restricted to the preconfigured tags of a language like HTML, XML allows me to categorize items as I wish. This freedom does create the problem of whether certain lines should be an element or an attribute. As is usually the case with an organization scheme, it depends on how one will use the information. There is some gratification in thinking through whether to write an attribute or an element and its justification. Here is the XML scheme that I wrote for practice.