- 3) Adding to the Template - in the code example, can we make those proper html comments? newbies may not know what they are, but we might as well introduce them to it now. that way, when it's properly introduced, they can think back and remember that they've seen them before.
- as i'm going through, i'm not a huge fan of the tutorial talking in the first person. would prefer second person (i.e. "if i" -> "if we"). feels... unrealistic that this person's name actually is "Drizzy Drake." 😉
- ah, there are parts written in the second person. let's make these uniform.
- (which is about 2 inches on a screen) - canadian here, what's an inch? 😉 besides my poor jokes, is this always going to be true? different DPIs will make it different lengths on a monitor. not a huge deal, but i feel like we might not need to say this. i might be looking into this too much.
- You can Google "CSS text align" to see what other alignment options are available besides center - let's directly link to a resource instead. first result for that search is w3schools, which is definitely not a shining example of a code resource. i'd use https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/text-align
- 5) Changing the Font - instead of
Arial, let's just usesans-serif. we can update with a description of what that means, and how it's a constant across all browsers. feels better than using a font that potentially (though unlikely) might not be on a computer. also, same thing with googling before. let's link to a direct resource on web safe fonts (though if we're adding a description ofsans-serif, maybe we can just inline a reference of these constants, likeserif,monospace, etc.). - i like that we have a list of resources at the end, but it feels weird to list cons for them. why would we endorse something if there's issues with it? let's either remove the cons list, or just list the best resources.
- woo, i made something! neat.
- i want to add something about the github repository we just created. we should mention that our code is public, and give an idea of working with open source. dispel any notions about hiding our code, talk about how github can let us work together. don't need to go into detail on the steps like forking and PRs, just that github makes collaboration easy.
- googling for programming stuff returns a lot of w3schools. ick. let's link to MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/) as a resource. everything there is up to date, and generally has more info. we can link to specific sub-resources, such as their html elements reference and such.
- we should remind the student that after making changes, they need to do the commit their changes with git to update their site. they might think that it updated because of the live preview, but that doesn't automatically push it to GH.
- we should have the user add the cloud9 ssh key to their github account, so they don't have to log in each time they want to make a commit.
- as well, we should have the user use the ssh url instead of the https url when cloning the repo, so that it uses the ssh key. (c9 doesn't have an easy way to set up the credential helper so we can use the https url without having to log in each time)
Some thoughts on the Searching vs Linking directly. The idea of having the students google it instead of directly linking is that it gets them comfortable with the idea that they can google things themselves and find it themselves.
As far as W3Schools and the ick factor. I understand why a lot of people don't like w3schools. However, the readability and low tech jargon level helps some students a whole bunch.
If these are important to you and how the tutorials are written/ran, you could potentially have them google still and point them in the direction of MDN, explaining why it's better, but that w3schools may be an option for students who a low tech jargon skill.