Re: [Sheflug] Re: Linux Professional Institute

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks [at] xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Johnson wrote:

> Everything you say in your mail is valid if a little harsh.  If you were an
> art critic versed in the ways of Dali, Da Vinci, Moet and Van Gogh (sp??)
> I'd not ask you to pass comment on my 3yr olds finger painting whilst he was
> in earshot.  ;0)
>
> Maybe you could sell them a redisigned site?  The start of a promising
> career?
Hi
hope you don't mind the private response as well as the one posted to 
the group.

I can be critical and actually quite cutting when I am being critical 
and I actually was trying to watch and curb that, but I think the things 
that got my goat about that site were the following

1.  Nonstandard work.
2.  Frontpage (almost guaranteed to be exclusively viewable in IE)
3.  Purporting to train in Linux in some way.
4.  Classic design faults using different fonts that may not be 
available on all machines out there and fixing font sizes.

The first three are bad enough imho.

Given the griefs we have all had with windows specific hardware and 
websites in the past and the work that is done to 'open the web' so that 
it is accessible to all no matter what browser, plus all the work that 
is done on creating and developing web standards e.g. xhtml, html and 
css, for a company that purports to train people to produce such a web 
site obviously in complete ignorance of these issues is in my book 
pretty poor show.

I am very sure they are working hard building up their portfolio or 
courses and have every need and right to concentrate on that. Am sure 
they are also concerned with their budgets and costs and need to keep 
those down but I think I made some valid points.

Unfortunately I feel I am becoming increasingly 'out of phase' with the 
reality of what's out there.  Learndirect for instance is offering 
Frontpage courses as part of it's web design course packages, so no 
matter how hard everyone else in the web world pushes, we are up against 
organisations constructed to make a profit and not really give a hoot 
about what they train people in.  There seems to be absolutely nothing 
in Learndirect web courses about web standards  Never mind the quality 
feel the width?

Obviously everyone else bar me runs IE and uses Windows ;) , but I 
swapped fully over to Linux at the tail end of last year and am still 
happy with it.  I don't intend to swap back but I want to finish 
building a box which I do plan to use for Linux stuff and then think 
about how I can fund an extra one to run XP Pro again.  The box I 
currently use is a Celeron and that'll do as a dedicated firewall 
(possibly IpCop) when I get to the state of two boxes.

I am in contact with them over the website and hope that they'll be 
interested in the redesign I've demonstrated could be possible to them.
By doing the redesign so that the information is clear, some at best 
poorly worded info and some conflicting repeated info is now much more 
noticeable.  What is good with it is that we have basically most of the 
content together and it's a matter of getting a good design of layout 
etc.  This is a good way to start with a web site.  Get the content 
sorted and an idea of how you like it to look and then get the finickty 
bits that make it 'sing' sorted.

Now as far as newsgroups that deal with Suse I have two in my emacs Gnus 
list and I occasionally read them :

alt.os.linux.suse
free.linux.suse

I stopped subscribing to

alt.linux.suse

because it's predominantly german speakers in there.  Not that I don't 
like German as a language but because my German is too rusty.

If you google for Suse and then look at the groups you'll find at least 
alt.os.linux.suse and alt.linux.suse listed there.

You can make up a google account and post to these groups through google 
but I would still advise using a spam-magnet email address or at least 
munging the one you are using :)

Hope this helps with the X problem.

Regards

Lesley
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