Pages

June 11, 2014

Course Redesign Update: June 11, labels labels labels

I did some important housekeeping today, adding labels to posts in order to give myself some more navigation options for the website, both for my own convenience, and to make things easier for my students — and for visitors too! I checked to make sure I could have so many labels at Blogger, and sure enough you can have up to 2000 labels, so no problems there. I'm using a lot of labels to manage my editorial process (proofreading, adding images, etc.), and there is also a label for every reading unit (for example, Apache Tales). That meant I already had a hundred or so labels in active use, but I'll certainly never get anywhere near 2000, ha ha.

So, after all the housecleaning today, there are also labels that pull up display pages for the modules, showing the index page for every unit in that module. For example, here are the Native American units. Those labels should be really handy as students are deciding which unit they want to read in any given week. I haven't figured out yet just how to organize the index pages for each unit; that is the next housecleaning task I need to work on.

I've also created labels to organize the books into groups, and I've begun the process of standardizing my book pages, deciding on which web sources to cite for the online books. So, here are some examples of posts that I've revised to reflect the kinds of online sources I think are worth listing; I'm using the label "donelib" just to keep track for myself of which posts have good bibliographies: finished book posts.

Meanwhile, you can see the various book labels here, like the Native American Books, for example, or the Free Audio Books.


So, in sum, I'm really glad how all this is going! There is always a tension in a project like this between making plans in advance and making decisions on-the-go. So far, I've made very good guesses about what things needed to be decided in advance and what things could take shape as the project evolves. I've done five book projects over the past eight years and learned lots from each one of those projects... and I'm putting what I learned to very good use this time around. I've never had a project go so smoothly as this one; knock on (virtual) wood! :-)