The Computer Club

Many new Linux users that were power users on Windows want to do things that they couldn't do on Windows. Now this is not a Linux vs. Windows post, nor doesn't mean there are ways to do it on Windows. But what I want to show here is a step by step method on having a web server up and running in no time including a personal blog. Feel free to read on.

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So many people that jump into Linux have some of the doubts on how can they migrate their work and still be effective in Linux. However most people have engraved work flows and demand certain process and applications. First question becomes:

Will my application run on Linux?

Most of this applications are proprietary and the parent company of the application might not have a Linux version. So once they face the application doesn't run.... but you can run this other Linux application the next problem will become:

Is this application has all my tools from my previous application?

On this step many commercial applications have become what many technologist called bloatware. Bloatware are applications that became bloated or they have gather so many features that try to become the trick of all trades.

So this post will give advice on how to implement the work flow for a web designer to keep doing their development using a complete suite of open source applications.

The HTML
One of the core things from HTML designers is the HTML, html is the end markup code that needs to be shoot at the browser. There are many tools that are HTML editors, however some designer have become used to use WYSIWYG or visual editors where they see a end representation of the webpage.

Some non-WYSIWYG editors will have quick links to the browsers. This might not be a solution for many users, but might be enough for a quick fix. A good editor that present a WYSIWYG interface and also bring you the tool to quickly see it on the browser is Quanta Plus. Other tool that also bring some GUI is NVU, NVU used to be the composer part of Netscape, the project has not been maintained in quite a while.
[http://images.linspire.com/applications/3373/6594/QuantaPlus/quanta1.png]

The Syling -- CSS
Quanta is also a good tool to build CSS, CSS gain strength with the introduction of xhtml. This XHTML is a good practice to develop clean HTML and convert the styles, menu's, heading, lists through another markup language called CSS. CSS stands for Cascade Style Sheet, there used to be very good CSS editors but they were bought by the makers of the HTML product and was integrated making it bloated. Well here Quanta might fall into that classification as it has a whole interface to develop CSS within the editor.

There are however other css editors such as CSSed which will parse the CSS and even give you a sample output of the final view.

CSS is very good for different reasons specially the easily deployment of styles across a whole site. This improve the maintainability of the site.

The Graphics
Graphics are always a big part of the design of websites, banners, icons, and many other graphics are usually implemented into websites. The Gimp might be a good tool to use here, even if the interface might confuse some of the people used to commercial tools such as Photoshop, Corel Draw and many other graphical tools.

Gimp is a powerful graphic editing software, and one of the filters that might help many web designers is the py-slice extension which allow users to make a large graphic and slice it into different parts. This is usually used for design things like shadows, or frames of text within a site. This blog might be there is a frame that has a shadow on both edges of the body.

Other tool that is also gaining strength for web designers is the use of vectorial graphics, this is good to create shapes or forms that are useful when generating icons. This tool is called inkscape. Inkscape is vector based graphical element one of the advantages is that it can export to rasterize formats such as PNG.

Server Side Code
More and more sites are not just static html content, you might also have a programming language that will make the page content become dynamic. Dynamic languages like PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl are widely available in the linux distros. IDE's are also available and some IDE might be on the HTML editors, others might be specialized IDE like PHPmole.

Having all these tools might be helpful and they are very available on all linux sites.

Putting it all together
So here is the important part, you can have all the tools of the world but it really won't make sense to you until you have a workflow. Workflow is what web designers are really attached to. They know the tools but the tools are not very relevant if they don't do what they learned once following the random tutorials of the web or at the classroom.

So what a new Linux Web Designer need to learn is the workflow of the design on Linux. So where to start, what to do first. Usually web designers start with prototyping the site on a graphical tool. So we will be looking at Inkscape for our first tool to use. Why inkscape? Inkscape perform better with shapes, The Gimp is more specialized when playing around with the colors manipulation but not so good with shape manipulation. Also inkscape can import rasterize images.

First we will choose a resolution useful for us, so when we create a new document we will chose desktop_1028x760 which would be the standard on design. Then we will start inserting the boxes we will need, generate and put the icons that we need. Remember this is just a prototype since we will need to migrate to the CSS to emulate the positioning on inkscape.

Once finish we could export the design to gimp in case we want to slice it, here is an optional since depends on the developing way of the designer. Py-slice will help up slice the banner, graphics and icons. Once you generate the pieces of graphic you can just put it on nvu or quanta, and switch to the HTML code to pixel match it.

A good tool that I might have missed mention is the Firefox Web development plug in, which will enable you to also do a more detailed editing on the web page. This extension can be found here.

Hope this was enough for everyone to get started. I will do a follow up more detailed on how to enable to design into the coding part.

On this post I want to talk about the way directories are meant to be worked. I remember a date when the computer was taken from the cultural levels, the computer was made as an office environment. The use of file-driven computer as well as directories and users. However nowadays computers are not only for work or office, and people use computers on diferent scopes.

Children will interact with the computer on a different way than adults. Through games they learn how to use the machine as opposed of a specific program. They understand the computer as a concept and not as a tool.

Adults think of the computer as an appliance just like the micrwave, freezer, or telephone or rather as a complementary tool for their work.

This difference can lead to a different experience for their rest of their life. Linking the computer with work can be a kiss of death for many users.

So what all these has to do with the folders and files, well, a folder is most tightly related to work than to entertainment. So a child that will learn to use a conceptual machine will probably also view the files and folders as a more modular way than regular office workers that actually deal with real life documents.

Files will come to become more like data than actual documents, the relevance of the folder name will be of less impact for a conceptual user than an office user and flexibility and diverstity will come at a faster rate.

This means that conceptual users will be more able to display an organization less strict and more modular in order to achieve the workflow they make on their own mind.

In linux for example, the concept of folders are well define, folders are files and files are files, that means that everything is pretty much subject to interpretation. A file that link to different files will portrait to the user that it has files inside. However at the same time, users can't store folders outside of their My Documents folder or HOME.

Users can't put files anywhere else except with special persmissions. This make the file structure more strict on one side but within the restriction is also more modular.

The explanation is that there is a different between where you can put files and once you are in a valid location what you can do with it. Files in linux are no difference than windows, however the tools to look for files can make it less strict than windows.

Files are easily searchable in linux which makes folders a bit less useful. Browsing through a whole list might be a very daunting task in windows while on linux is very simple and trivial. This make the Linux structure a bit less piramidal and more about flat.

Users are free to rebuild their windows folder structure, but once they learn the new file managment tools they might adopt the flexibility that linux filters bring.

$ ls *.odt 

Here is a example of how we only want the list of files to belong to an OpenDocument document. Even if we have music, pictures, shell scripts etc. We will only list the Opendocument files.

$ ls *.odt | grep Birthday

Here we can not only list the files but also only show the ones with the Birthday word on the name of the file. This is kind of a double filter, the first is to only get the OpenDocument data and the next will display only the OpenDocuments with the word Birthday on it.

In this example we easily went through a very big list and get the information that we needed.

End users might not get this because they are not used to having a command line, even windows power users might be through off by the idea of learning commands. However linux also have file managers, the only issue so far is that they are build to emulate the window file management which make it more limited.

However in file managers like Gnome's Nautilus, you can easily select a file and time the name of the file and it will automatically get to the file in question.



For the conceptual user, the use of this environment will dramatically change the way to look at folder and files but at the same time will make him more able to apply more flat views of data, less structured but more flexible.

The command line is something that scares a lot of people, while to the more experienced users it starts hidden passions. Basically the command line is something very simple and consist on nothing more than a cursor.

What is a cursor, you ask? Well is a simple line in the inferior part of a character, something like a character wide underline.

So why it scares a lot of people? Well basically is the simplicity and the lack of information. Users don't have choice on what to choose and they have to know what to choose before typing. Logically for someone that has no idea what to put will send him/her running around screaming.

The opposite of the command line is the graphical user interface which is something that consist of a menus. Menus will give you options and items that will perform something on a program. This way is easier for people because even if they don't know it by heart they can go arround looking on the different things they can do.

So let say you want to put a bold format to a text, you can logically look into a menu item called format and then another item call bold, in that process they will also see italics and underlining. Also GUI have pointers or commonly known as mouse which is a device that let you rapidly access these menus.

So if the GUI so superior why people still like command line? Well the advantage of the command line is that users that know what to put can perform tasks faster than GUI users, even with the help of a mouse.

Phisically, a user can type faster than move around a windows and get the necesary mouse movements to do the same thing.

How can they do that? Well let say you have two users with a piece of paper, user number #1 will have to type cat, while user #2 will have to draw a cat. Which one do you think will finish first? Think about how many hand movements were produced by the user #1 vs. #2.

So users that already know that they have to write the 'cat' program can start faster and also other key things can help users start multiple programs by just typing them on the same line. I wont get into specificts, but imagine doing 4 actions with one click? Some power command line users will write new commands that will launch many commands itself, and the execution becomes just typing 1 word to expand all the functionality that a GUI user will have to perform doing multiple clicks (like drawing a cat).

One of the things that many people that use windows and don't know other OS, usually gets a bit puzzle is sometimes the brutal hatred expresed by people that use other OS. Many people are indeed intrigued by this, some of them get frigten and think they are bigotry.

If we had a ranting linux user on one side and a Windows power user on the other we will see very different pattern in the way of thinking.

The Windows View
Windows users will think that computers ought to be running windows, the line is straight, you just from Windows 98 to Windows ME to Windows XP and to Windows Vista. If you want other non-PC centric technology you have windows CE and then Windows Mobile.

You usually have software that should be in the computer such as microsoft office, internet explorer, windows media. Then we have all this other free downloads that you can install to get up to speed. This include Java, Flash, Acrobat reader etc.

Most windows (and mac) users think the OS is hard-builded with the computer (specially newbies) they dont understand the OS is shiftable, except of course when there is a new version and they have a bridge software usually called 'upgrade edition'. So they classify the computer environment as Macs and PC.

Recently immortalized on the famous apple commercials:

On this windows-centric world, the channels of distribution are set, windows users get their software either from websites or from stores. They have an installer CD or an installer file and it go through a window that will ask for information and install on their computer. After that they will see the application on the menu and they will be on their machines.

The Linux View
Most linux users were windows users at one point, however they were driven into linux for many reasons. One was the challence, other was the mouth to mouth recomendation. Another was that it was require for a lesson in college, other was that they find out that linux doesnt cost any money and all the software on top is also without any cost.

More mature linux users learn that there were difference in this aspect and even thought it is true most people start having an understanding that this is something completly different. They start seeing this is more like a social computing experiment where there is a community and that usually you have to communicate with people in order to improve yourself, this is when they learn the community.

When this Linux users look back into the windows world they found a cold, frivolous and intolerant world. They also see a lot of people with very limited view of what technology really is, they look more like droids that are guided by 1 company. That is when they start looking at this giant monolitic company and usually making smoke screen, cheats, and bullying to hold back from people realizing there is technology outside of their world.

This is when the hate really start, when they see people being unable to figure out the world outside of windows. When they see the constant issues that this OS present yet the users don't really seem to realize. They just think this is the way that the machine works.

From then on is a constant frustration from the manufacturers not supporting anything else than windows, government making rulings based that there is only one OS. This sentiment is usually shared and start growing as more and more people get organized around the world and launch campaing against a monocultural digital world.

This is only an abstract of what I have seen as an ex-Windows power user running into Linux several years ago and completely moving to Linux and getting good every day now.