Continuing Legal Education

In Ohio, Judges and Magistrates have to complete 10 of their 24 cle hours through the Ohio Judicial College. In my experience, the Judicial College courses are generally a bit more interesting and well designed than your average cle. I guess since Judges and Magistrate make the decisions, we would all hope they would be fairly insightful and genuinely educational.

Next year being my reporting period, I need to get my credits. Today I attended a seminar on how to design a Court Website. Not that I will ever be allowed to touch our website, but I thought it would be interesting.

I have been creating my own web pages for a little more than five years. I don't use a web editor. I just code everything on my own, embellishing occassionally with free script.

I learned stuff today! Even better, I was able to play with Front Page. I found it a little frustrating. While I could see some advantages to using an editing program, I struggled a bit with some graphics and was completely annoyed that I couldn't just see the code to fix it. They were moving quickly through the steps and I didn't have much opportunity to play with any parts other than what they were showing us. Finally, with a half way decent site created (I used nice teals and greys), the speaker moved on to another portion of the lecture after another staff member mentioned that you could also look at the code if you wanted.

I started clicking everything on the toolbar, trying to find the magic button that would allow me to see the html. I almost gave up, when I spied "Code" sparkling at the bottom of the screen. I clicked, and ta-da! Up popped the code. I tweaked the code and discovered that I could save those changes as well.

Suddenly I was determined. I'll be rearranging my website as part of my 101 things list. I need an editor. I must have one. I can still write my own code, but I can create templates and save them on my computer. I can preview before I update the site. I can do, many, many wonderful things and I can still write my own code.

Huzzah!

So I drove home determined to convince Chas that we needed a web page editor.

He grimaced at the mention of Front Page--it just isn't that great. Then I mentioned Dreamweaver. "Do you know how much that costs?" At this point I was feeling a teensy bit deflated.

Then he mentioned that when he was thinking he would be creating the template for his blogs new home, he looked for free html editors. He found Alleycode. It does html and css.

Huzzah again!

So the program is downloaded and my enthusiasm is back. I hope to have a new and improved website within 1001+ Days.