It has been my pleasure to have taught the Web Publishing course at Moore College this term. All of my students really showed a keen interest in a subject that has a lot of subjectivity to it! Web design is not easy to learn as it is not a standardized entity. I myself continue to learn and grow in my efforts to keep pace with the way the web grows in its own amorphous way.

Teaching is a really rewarding occupation and I felt very blessed and rewarded by this semester’s effort. I can only hope that whatever errors I may have made will be taken in stride with my desire to impart knowledge to a tricky field. All of the work that I looked at this term from all of the students was really inspiring and I hope that all of them will continue to grow and create. They truly set a high bar in terms of teaching pleasure. I am already looking forward to next term’s course. For those who are curious, you can visit the course notes here. Until then, best of luck and congradutatios to a job well done.

Wew! Well, after much tweaking, I took my static page design and converted it to a theme for WordPress [I dubbed it "Manrilla Blue"]to use as my front page. It’s still in the beta stage but good enough for the moment. This was quite an undertaking and admittedly, a lot more difficult than I had initially planned. I am not a programmer and the world of dynamic web pages is still new to me. I have only recently begun to explore Ruby and I hope that over the year I will be able to delve into that and make use of what seems to be a powerful web app. Feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think of it.

October marked the 1-year anniversary for my photo essay project, Philadelphian: The Low-Fi Shots Series. Exclusively shot on my cell phone, the Low-Fi Shots Series is an exploration into the daily social life of many of Philadelphia’s citizens. From public transportation to a Center City diner, this photo essay reveals Philadelphians of all backgrounds. It also demonstrates how new technologies such as the cell phone camera, can breathe life into the world of street photography and personal journalism in a way that other “known and recognized” cameras just can’t.

“I like the ability to crawl inside social spaces I (and vis-a-vie, a larger camera) cannot or even would not be allowed to go. Modern society has been conditioned to recognize the camera as something intrusive, even hostile. But even when the reaction is not hostile the reciprical effect is that people also begin to pose when they see a camera.”

See more of the photo essay, Philadelphian: The Low-Fi Shots Series, here.