Due Thurs, Sept 20. I'm sticking with that date. If you don't get every last feature into HW2, well, you have the same teams for HW3 and you can finish it there.
Added 9.7.2007: New requirement: put me in your FaceBook. Grab my picture from the home page of my website. "Added data: The best dog who ever owned me was named Harold." Learn how to use a screen grabber; download shareware if necessary. Ask Google about a screen grabber if you don't want to pay for Snagit or whatever.
You are to take the FaceBook demo as a starting point, and take it another step. Click here to see rough prototype. Take that as a starter kit, i.e., you may borrow/steal/whatever-we're-going-to-call-it from the HTML for that page and modify it. Great way to learn; great way to save time and evade errors. I'm in the process of changing all references to MyFace, to FaceBook, and my host seems to have died in the middle of the process. It's there; mouse around. (Might still be at http://ccnyddm.com/473Fall2007/MyFaceStartingPoint.htm .)
You will see space for ten photos and ten names. Remove the entries for everything except the four students.
Look up the material on the HTML box model, and put a colored border around each picture. If you want to put in a bit of added effort, and learn more in the process, put a colored border around the photo, and a border of a different color around the entire entry for a student.
I will provide you photos & names for three more students. Insert them, and make the positioning such that the last names are in alphabetical order.
Somebody take pictures of your team members. Get pictures, actually; if you have pictures lying around, you may use them. If any member of the team has a photo by me, replace it with your work.
Every student's entry should have an additional text field, besides name: the city or borough where the student live. If anybody lives in a sufficiently small town that this could represent and invasion of privacy, fake it. Use the county name, for example.
There is a certain amount of effort involved in gathering the files and data here. I invite you to find a way to simplify the process. For example, an enterprising student might offer to gather data and then sell it, presumably in magnetic form that makes the work easier. And I didn't say anything about the choice of whose pictures to put in. Another enterprising student might gather the pictures and "profile data" for ten students and make it available, for a small fee, to other teams. (Very small fee, please.)
What does this have to do with website design, you say? Well, remember that we are looking at Web 2.0, or at least I hope we will. Dig around in this site and you will find this sentence: "Web 2.0: What's with letting the user design the content and interaction???" I want the course this semester to deal with the "people issues" in designing and implementing a Web site: the organization of effort required to obtain, organize, and disseminate the data that goes into a site is a part of the job of building a site. A bit off the beaten track of the typical CCNY CS course, but I suggest that it is experience that you will find beneficial. There are schools where it would be right down the middle of the fairway, if I may invoke a golf metaphor.
Stop! I could keep adding to this until it would be a three- to four-week assignment, and I don't want to do that. HW3 will involve getting some input from the user, I think, but in a static sort of way. We're not ready to jump into a full-fledged dynamic Web site. Soon.
Ah, tell ya' what. I'll sketch some of the additions in HW3, and let you keep the same teams as in HW2. Except, as to teams: you are allowed to swap team membership. If Person A on Team X wants to trade places with Person B on Team Y, and these people's teammates don't object, you may make the switch. Just tell me. (This is to give you some more experience with real-world teamwork issues. Everybody asks for CS grads to have better "soft skills," presumably meaning writing, speaking, and relationship skills. They don't tell us how to teach that! Here's an experiment--let you negotiate changes in the team assignments I made on HW1. Dunno if it will work. If I knew that, it wouldn't be an experiment.)
Added features: