The Bridge Blog
A dialog about our new bridge and these web pages
Overview. As a pointy-headed
university professor, my weekend project of bridge photography and
building these web pages generated many questions and introduced me
to just-in-time learning. I enjoy chasing my curiosity and
want to identify ways to encourage younger learners to also enjoy curiosity
chasing and learning.
Learning usually requires repetition while forgetting occurs when
I infrequently use information. Many young learners do not understand
the importance of repetition. Weekly visits to the bridge provided
the repetition necessary to detect changes in the bridge and
consequently generated
many questions and opportunities for learning. Over the course of the
bridge project, I had access to few experts for answering questions.
Rather than a liability, this became an asset and pushed me to improve
my search skills with Google. Soon, I found that answers
to questions encountered during my weekly photo shoots were often
only a Google-search away -
(see
Restoring the Joy in Learning). Consequently Google + Internet became
dependable extensions of my memory.
The bridge story is a work in progress and is evolving from a simple
collections of photographs to an experiment with Internet-centric
just-in-time learning.
Insights I gain from you
will find their way into the learning centers of MUSC.
Palmetto Bridge Constructors, a joint venture between
Tidewater
Skanska and
Flatiron Constructors, as well as
High Steel Structures,
Freyssinet, the
SCDOT and the
Federal Highway Commission Office
of Bridge Technology guided much of my learning.
I also learn from many of you and from Google-linked resources. More
important is the e-mail encouragement I receive from many of you.
Wed, 08 Jun 2005
June 8 2005: A short web lesson:
Managing a small web site is a challenge, a learning opportunity and
an opportunity to explore my Google-Internet memory amplifier.
In addition to the bridge web pages, I follow the lives of a few
spiders in our garden and built web pages which reveal a bit of their lives
(see Natasha or
mating banana spiders). Every morning I review the web access logs to
see what is happening.
This morning I saw that Google-directed hits to our banana spider pages
are increasing and almost equal to the Google-directed hits to
our new Cooper River Bridge web pages.
What is the software base that enables me to manage these web pages?
I use the open source distribution of GNU-Linux
from RedHat
for my web server environment which includes
Apache as the web serving software.
For development, I use the GNU-Linux distribution from
the RedHat
sponsored Fedora project which also includes Apache. Finally, I use
Google to answer technical questions that
arise when I am building these web pages.
Apache writes an entry into either an access log or an error log each
time a web page is accessed. Monitoring the logs helps track web site
access patterns and identify errors that creep
into these web pages. To analyze the logs, I use
AWstats. This tracks
where web page requests originate and more important, summarizes the
search expressions
used to access web pages. From these data, I can directly see what is
interesting and what is never touched. This provides guidance for
experimenting with different ideas and determining how to better meet the
needs of readers.
Here is the table from the
summary of web activity since Sunday June 5.
| key phrases | Frequency | Percent |
| banana spider | 160 | 4.5 % |
| cooper river bridge | 128 | 3.6 % |
| new cooper river bridge | 52 | 1.4 % |
| ravenel bridge | 51 | 1.4 % |
| butterflys | 47 | 1.3 % |
| banana spiders | 41 | 1.1 % |
| forgetting | 31 | 0.8 % |
| french wildlife | 24 | 0.6 % |
| matrix calculus | 22 | 0.6 % |
| charleston bridge | 18 | 0.5 % |
| arthur ravenel bridge | 15 | 0.4 % |
| nernst-planck equation | 13 | 0.3 % |
| nephila clavipes | 13 | 0.3 % |
Note: I never know when I'll learn something new - and making this
blog entry provided
an unexpected surprise. When I first wrote the above, I had forgotten the
HTML tags for a table header - so I used
Google and the search words: how to make html table . The first
entry:
sorttable: Make all your tables sortable did not answer my question but
revealed a way to enable browser-based sorting of columns within a table.
Since this looked like a fun idea, I followed their recipe and suddenly
the colums in the above table became sortable.
The total time required for this experiment - 10 minutes.
Curious about other tricks available from this site, I
backed up a level
and found a collection of interesting
scripts for enabling other browser-based presentation features.
This is a typical example of the positive impact associated with
chasing curiosity within our Internet connected world.
posted at: 10:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry
