I have kept a Weblog like this once before, and found it a very useful way of keeping track of my thoughts and of useful bits of information (and useful web pages) that I discovered along the way. I really don't know how long this mini-project is going to take, especially as I'm not able to work on it full-time, but I feel it shouldn't take me more than a week or two if I can devote at least a couple of hours to it every day. I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to achieve, but the details - and how to implement it - are not clear to me as I write this. I've used PHP before but am no expert, which is fairly typical in computing since new languages are springing up all the time.
Of course creating a set of web pages like this is a lot more time
consuming than simply keeping a hand-written or word-processed logbook,
but it's not that hard once you've got everything set up. The main reason
I'm doing this is because I want to record my thoughts etc. for my own future reference. I also hope that this Weblog will be a good example for
students. I now recommend to all my project students that they should
keep a Weblog like this instead of a normal logbook (assuming that they
already have some prior experience of website design) for these reasons:
- it enables others (e.g. your supervisor) to see how your project is progressing
- if it's kept well, it might be worth showing to prospective employers
- it's easy to incorporate links to any useful web pages you come across
- it's easy to incorporate screenshots - e.g. to show programs in execution
- it's a good vehicle for experimenting with website design - I'm using it now to try out several features of HTML that I haven't used before.
For any students reading this - it is vital to keep some kind of logbook if you are embarking on a practical project, either in the form of a Weblog like this or a more traditional handwritten or word-processed logbook. Not only should doing this be helpful to you, but it also provides evidence of your progress during the course of the project. In particular, it provides evidence that the program(s) you submit at the end are genuinely the result of your own hard work. Given the range of source code that is now freely available over the Internet, it is inevitable that there will be a suspicion of plagiarism if you fail to submit a convincing logbook of some kind.
It's not hard to find other examples of "Weblogs" on the Internet. The history of Weblogs is explained in >>this weblogs.com article, and here is a >>Guardian Unlimited weblog guide.