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Work Stuff
Apr. 25th, 2007 07:38 pmThank you to all of you who helped me so much with my cover letter. I'm afraid I didn't get any of the suggestions on the last draft until after the five-day deadline had passed, so (horrors!) I just mailed it in like that.
I was going to try to update it anyway in case I came up with an excuse to re-mail it, but then my favorite excuse, my third reference, confirmed that he still wanted to be a reference. Plus I really can't stand to look at that thing anymore, so I haven't. I haven't even checked whether there were any squiggly lines on the Word document.
I'm planning to call next Monday or whenever the job disappears off the list of openings to confirm that my application was received. It's going to the director, so I really don't want to bother him. But polite people should confirm these things, and this should give him enough time. Plus when you call people, sometimes they tell you extra stuff about the job or your chances or other interesting items.
If he didn't get it, I've got an excuse to re-write it again.
I can feel some of the effects of your writing suggestions echoing through my head with some of my other writing. One result, for example, is that I was better able to avoid spoilers in my last movie review.
So, thanks again.
**
[Warning: Cascading Style Sheets geek talk ahead]
At work yesterday I found a tip of the day on a web page that I use to test the formatting of my work web pages. And this one inspired me to make some changes. We have jump boxes (boxes full of links that jump you to another part of the page). Currently I have them formatted as a special kind of paragraph, but the tip recommended that we instead format these kinds of things as a special kind of list. Things like this are easier for people listening to web pages to understand when they are formatted as lists because then the items are separated rather than all running together. Also, they really are more like lists than like paragraphs, so it makes sense anyway.
So I spent some time seeing if I could re-do the CSS code so that it would format an unordered list as a list of items separated by pipes. One of the sources referred to in the tip of the day even included an example of one that does this exact thing even on Explorer which doesn't support the command that says, "Hey, put this symbol between the items," but which does support borders. I couldn't quite get that strategy to work for me, so I'm still typing in the pipes myself. However, I did also modify things so I no longer have to tell it where to start on a new line without breaking up a link (now also a list item) between lines. So that's a second improvement.
I also was surprised that so many of these Listamatic examples all used "id" in lots of places where I normally use "class" and they all had "div" commands. So I researched that. It turns out they're using "id" for any class of things that happens only once per page. Like navbars. That sounds fine, though I don't feel like changing all my pages. Still, it's a good idea to keep in mind for other pages I do in the future.
I also learned that some people like the term "div-itis" for people who use divs everywhere when they could use normal html tags. I may have the opposite problem. I never use divs at all. I almost never use spans either. Instead, I may have "class-itis." Or maybe that's just for people who use class repetitively (like in every li) when they could use it just once (like in ul), in which case it's not me.
This whole process was actually lots of fun. I feel inspired to continue learning more about CSS capabilities. I wasn't really a fan of CSS when I was first introduced to it, but after seeing examples where people show how they've tweaked it different ways to make very different results (specifically, different ways to display unordered lists horizontally, some of which are very cool, like tabbed lists), I also enjoyed tweaking mine. It would be even more fun if I were making my own page instead of having to make it look like someone else's design, but still it was a fun exercise.
I was going to try to update it anyway in case I came up with an excuse to re-mail it, but then my favorite excuse, my third reference, confirmed that he still wanted to be a reference. Plus I really can't stand to look at that thing anymore, so I haven't. I haven't even checked whether there were any squiggly lines on the Word document.
I'm planning to call next Monday or whenever the job disappears off the list of openings to confirm that my application was received. It's going to the director, so I really don't want to bother him. But polite people should confirm these things, and this should give him enough time. Plus when you call people, sometimes they tell you extra stuff about the job or your chances or other interesting items.
If he didn't get it, I've got an excuse to re-write it again.
I can feel some of the effects of your writing suggestions echoing through my head with some of my other writing. One result, for example, is that I was better able to avoid spoilers in my last movie review.
So, thanks again.
**
[Warning: Cascading Style Sheets geek talk ahead]
At work yesterday I found a tip of the day on a web page that I use to test the formatting of my work web pages. And this one inspired me to make some changes. We have jump boxes (boxes full of links that jump you to another part of the page). Currently I have them formatted as a special kind of paragraph, but the tip recommended that we instead format these kinds of things as a special kind of list. Things like this are easier for people listening to web pages to understand when they are formatted as lists because then the items are separated rather than all running together. Also, they really are more like lists than like paragraphs, so it makes sense anyway.
So I spent some time seeing if I could re-do the CSS code so that it would format an unordered list as a list of items separated by pipes. One of the sources referred to in the tip of the day even included an example of one that does this exact thing even on Explorer which doesn't support the command that says, "Hey, put this symbol between the items," but which does support borders. I couldn't quite get that strategy to work for me, so I'm still typing in the pipes myself. However, I did also modify things so I no longer have to tell it where to start on a new line without breaking up a link (now also a list item) between lines. So that's a second improvement.
I also was surprised that so many of these Listamatic examples all used "id" in lots of places where I normally use "class" and they all had "div" commands. So I researched that. It turns out they're using "id" for any class of things that happens only once per page. Like navbars. That sounds fine, though I don't feel like changing all my pages. Still, it's a good idea to keep in mind for other pages I do in the future.
I also learned that some people like the term "div-itis" for people who use divs everywhere when they could use normal html tags. I may have the opposite problem. I never use divs at all. I almost never use spans either. Instead, I may have "class-itis." Or maybe that's just for people who use class repetitively (like in every li) when they could use it just once (like in ul), in which case it's not me.
This whole process was actually lots of fun. I feel inspired to continue learning more about CSS capabilities. I wasn't really a fan of CSS when I was first introduced to it, but after seeing examples where people show how they've tweaked it different ways to make very different results (specifically, different ways to display unordered lists horizontally, some of which are very cool, like tabbed lists), I also enjoyed tweaking mine. It would be even more fun if I were making my own page instead of having to make it look like someone else's design, but still it was a fun exercise.