Hello, World

I don’t think I’ve ever launched a class website by saying, “Here it is! Everything is complete and all the details are finalized!”

Certainly, that is not the case with this website and this announcement. That said, this website has more content than I usually have at this point in the semester (i.e., the first day of classes), so I feel pretty good about that.

If you’re reading this, I assume you’re a student in the class, so you should have a look around at what’s here. There’s a tentative schedule page which links out to various other things, so you might want to start there. Or, the “About” page for this site is also the class syllabus, so that’s a good place to start, too.

This website is hosted in Github, by the way, so you can browse the site as a regular website, like you’re probably doing now, or you can also view its code repository. You won’t normally need to do that, but it might be interesting to see how Github normally looks. You also might find it interesting to browse some of the code examples I’ve already loaded.

Github is a service for sharing code, and you’ll be hosting your code work in Github for most of your projects this semester. If you don’t already have a Github account, you should sign up for an account. I’ll show you how to use it later.

Additionally, your homework after the first day is listed on the schedule page.

Finally, we’re going to do a little creative coding in class today as a kind of warmup for the semester. Briefly:

• Download and install Sublime Text (unless you already have a code editor you prefer)
• Save a copy of Nick Montfort’s HTML/Javascript poem, “Taroko Gorge”
• Edit the Javascript in that file to make your own poem
• View and share the results

I’ll walk you through these steps in class, and if you want to work in a group, that’s fine.