Well here it is. My last blog post for the unit. First of all I would like to say that I am finally glad this blog is over. For the past fifteen weeks I’ve been struggling to bring myself to write this every week. I just don’t think that blogging is really for me. Typing about myself and what I have been doing because it was an assessment was a hard thing to do. I needed to try and find my own writing style and make it interesting so that people would want to read my blog. I think that it would be a hard task to write about something of my choice and make it interesting, let alone write about something that I was required to write about.
That being said this blog has been a big learning experience for me. I am not going to say that I will never blog again, but it might be awhile before I get back onto the blogging scene. One thing I do know is that when I blog again I have picked up many different skills in which to make it more interesting and accessible for the reader. If you could see a timeline of how my blog progressed over the course of the semester you would see a variety of changes. From the layout, to the content and even changes in my style. The best example of change was my template that I started using after many weeks of having this blog. I was looking at other people’s blogs and seeing that they had really cool backgrounds and mine was just a simple blogger background. So I eventually changed it in to what it is now, which looks much nicer. I also played around with the little tabs that my blog could have such as links and RSS etc.
Now I will get onto the big topic of traffic or rather I should say a lack of traffic generated from my blog. The first thing that I did when I started my blog was got a list of everyone in the class and linked to them on my blog roll. At the start I was going to keep up to date with everyone and read what they were doing. I also got myself an RSS reader and kept up to date with some other blogs that I enjoyed. However I found myself visiting everyone’s blog less and less until I finally had about three on my reader which I read but rarely visited the others. This was because these three people managed to make their blogs good and interesting while talking about the unit. Unfortunately this meant that the other people’s blogs just got shunned to the side. Now if I use this theory in relation to my blog I think the same thing would apply. There are many links of my in peoples blog roll but unfortunately I did not know how to set up any thing to check traffic (ill get more into this later). As for followers I had a whole two of them, which turned out to be two guys from my tutorial. When I linked into people on my blog roll I automatically assumed that it meant I was becoming a follower but apparently you have to do this another way. That being known know I’m actually happy that I even have two followers.
When sitting down to write this final blog post I was unsure what to do about traffic. I had no way to know just how much traffic that my blog was getting. I seen a class member post up on moodle that they were having the same problem as me and the post eventually got an answer. I was still unsure of how I was meant to talk about this so I looked at the class member’s blog and seen how they tackled the answer. I then looked it up on online and found that in order to monitor traffic you needed to set up a counter or use some software such as Google analytics to keep a record of how often your blog is visited. This is very important because if you can keep track of how many people are coming to your blog you can keep it going the same or change it around to suit more people. Google analytics also keeps track of how people interact with your blog, such as which links they click on and how they get there. This could also be very useful data because you can see what people like and do not like. Knowing where people link off to from your blog can give you better ideas of content to put on there. That way you could increase traffic by making it more specific to their interests. The best way to increase traffic is by doing little things like this. Looking at how they interact with the blog, looking at their interests and disinterests, and trying to provide content for them and when that isn’t possible to link them to the content they want. I have found that the best thing about network media is that you don’t always need to be the guy who knows everything. When you don’t quite understand something or don’t know much about on a particular topic you can just link off to somewhere that does. That way you can keep your readers happy and still provide them with the information that they want.
In my blog roll I only had blogs of people that were in my class. I subscribed to many other blogs using my newsreader but did not put them on my blog roll. If any outside people looked in on my blog they would be linked to people who were talking about the same things week in and week out that I was. Also if any one from another tute looked at my blog they would be linked to all the people in my tute. I also directed traffic to the uni home page and just random sites that had to do with the information we were learning about. For example when I started I directed people to a BlogSpot template site.
If I was to do this blog again I think that I would change a lot of things. First of all I would probably post more regularly about any thing. Just to try and keep it interesting to a wide variety of people. I got stuck in the habit of writing the required one post a week about lecture material or assignments that I was working on at the time. I would also do more in the area of setting up a traffic counter and putting more interesting links in my blog. Overall I think that through doing this blog I learnt a lot about network media practices. In terms of how to monitor traffic, linking to other people and how to make a good blog. I think that if I started a blog about a topic I enjoy I would be able to make an interesting informative blog and who knows, I might even make some money off it one day.
Three Nominated Blog Posts
Week 1, A Bit of Content
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/02/bit-of-content.html
Week 10, Pimping The Ol’ City
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-10-pimping-ol-city.html
Week 12, The Business End
http://mediayanr.blogspot.com/2010/04/week-12-business-end.html
Well the term is almost over. Its 1:46 on a friday morning and im pretty much finished my Geo Narrative. I realised that I had not blogged yet for this week so here I am in the early hours of the morn. The things uni students do to make sure they get marks! My Geo narrative is just started to come together nicely now. It has images and video and links off onto other things. If you could be bothered to read my rationale it tells you all about it. Pity the rationale cant be used as a blog post because my Geo Narrative is all I really have to talk about at the moment. I just need to add some finishing touches to it such as the text being spaced and maybe playing around with colours and stuff. I also have another media assignment due tomorrow so when these are both handed in I will be very pleased with myself. Just one more day before I go on 11 weeks of holidays. Or rather 11 weeks of working to make money so im not poor next semester.
Today was the last class for Network Media Production and it was rather sad. I really enjoyed the way our class operated and the people in it. It was a Good Romance. I especially enjoyed Tom Cruise when he showed up. The two hour classes would fly whenever he decided to grace us with his presence. In the end I think that I have learnt alot from this unit. From creating websites to writing blogs and making stories in google maps. It was alot of work but in the end it was good. Now its 2 in the morning and im thinking that this blog post is in trouble of becoming a unit satisfaction survey. So I might head to bed and write some more tomorrow. Or when I come back over my posts and add things here and there. You will hear from me soon!
URL GOOGLE MAPS http://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=111213758830809272135.0004864f3ddf70560879e&z=11
For my Network Media Production Project B I chose to create a Geo Narrative. The reason that I did not decide to create a datavisulization was because when I started the assignment I was still a bit unsure on what a datavisulization was. So I thought it was better to go with something that seemed like I could do a good job of. I looked over the option and decided that the best was to write a fictional story, which I based off four friends. It took me a long time to think of an idea for the story and write down a draft. From there I fine tuned the story and needed to figure out how many location markers I would use, how many images and videos I would need to take and how to organise it all. The thing that I liked most about this assignment was the process of telling the story through Google maps. If you read a novel or magazine story it can be quite interesting or quite boring depending on how well the story is written. However by writing a story using Google maps and adding images and videos to locations as well as text it can create a lot of interest. It creates an interactive environment, which makes reading a story more fun and gives you’re a greater understanding of what is happening and where it is happening.
This is the reason that Google maps is a good example of network media. There are so many different ways in which you can link in different forms of media to the story. As mentioned above you can use text, link in websites, images and videos. When reading the story you can see an image and then click on a link to go onto some further reading. This is really good because it creates many opportunities to get information out of the story instead of just reading a bunch of text. For this reason I found Google maps to be a very handy tool in creating an interesting networked media production.
Some troubles that I ran across whilst doing this assignment was the process of taking the photos and making the videos. Due to the fact that it was a story about four different people, it made it hard to get all my actors in one spot at one time. This was because everyone had their own commitments. If I could do this assignment again I would not choose a class member to be an actor because we both had lots of work to do for our own assignments and was hard to accommodate both persons schedules. I also had trouble getting the images and video to load onto the locations. I found that when uploading onto flickr the image did not come out at a sufficient size when linked onto Google maps. However a classmate pointed me in the direction of Google Picasa which I uploaded my photos to and had no problems.
One thing I tried to do was make the story as realistic as possible. Therefore I created a story which could happen everyday and tried to keep the visuals simple and to the point. I toyed with editing the images in Photoshop but due to lack of skills was not able to do much. However by keeping the photos simple it worked well with the overall story. I also decided to keep Marvin's day a mystery to create more interest with the reader. I thought that by keeping what he did secret the reader would sit there wondering what he was getting himself into. Until finally the video at the end doesn't explain any thing, but leaves you with more to wonder about. I also thought this would provide some good humor to the story to also help add interest.
Seeing as this was my first time doing a project like this I learnt some good lessons when it comes to taking photos and video. It’s always a good idea to try and get them all taken on the same day. Otherwise a lot of variable factors come into play such as costume changes, different weather etc. It is also a good idea to try and get the images taken as soon as possible. There were a few occasions when I put my photos on computer and realised something wrong with them and needed a retake. The sooner the photos are taken the more time you have to organise a retake if they are wrong. I also learnt that it is very handy to borrow photos off other people. For one of the locations I found a really nice photo on flickr from another member of the class. So i asked them if I could use the picture for my geo narrative. Although I did not ask a random stranger for the photo I think that people are generally willing to share their stuff around as long as due credit is given to them. Copyright is a big issue so i tried to stay away from using other peoples images for this project. But if I was to do it again I would probably have a bigger look around and get in contact with more people about using their works.
Another problem I found in making my video was having sound in the background for some shots and not in others. The video turned out to be a bit of a throw together because I did not have time to get the actors all together again to retake it. However I left it in my assignment because I thought that even if it was poor quality it still added a needed element, which would have been missed if I left it out.
Overall I do not think that this was a very difficult assignment but it was time consuming. Not a lot of technical knowledge was needed in order to create a good piece of work. Rather just creative ideas and making sure that you spent time putting all the different forms of media together. I really enjoyed doing this assignment and was happy with how it all turned out in the end.
I almost forgot to blog this week when I got a friendly reminder in class today. I have been so busy lately with work. Someone called in sick for the whole week so I have been working for 7 nights straight. Inbetween uni and work I have been trying to get all my work done but I seem to be getting behind. It is especially showing in Japanese because I have not had time to memorise all the new words. Learning a language is hard. I also finished writing the story that I will be using in my geonarrative today. The hard part about this is taking all the images and video for the different slides. I need to get my actors together all at one time and most of them are also busy with uni seeing as the end of the semester is coming up. Hopefully I can finish it all off this weekend or early next week so I have time to go over it.
I have also been working on another Media assignment involving putting all my images onto a final cut slideshow. This assignment has been frustrating because it involves having final cut to do it. So I need to be at uni and finding a spare computer is usually very hard. This is the good thing about the geo narrative because I can do it at home whenever I want.
On a lighter note I have been keeping track of a new halo game that is coming out this year called Halo Reach. So far I have been very impressed and can see myself playing it alot. Halo lan party wooooo. Any ways good luck to everyone else who has plenty of stuff to finish before the semester is over.
Peace
Hey everyone. It's week 12 and it's time to get down to business. Lots of assessment and not much time to do it in. There was no lecture this week for Network because last week was Michael's last one. This cleared up my tuesday afternoon for other activities. Looking at the amount of assessment due for me this week and the coming two weeks my tuesday afternoon activities will probably consist of working on assignments. Which is exactly what I have been doing all day today. Wednesday my beloved day off from uni and work was slaughtered by the fact that I have a Japanese assignment due tomorrow and an essay due in on friday. Now I am a procrastinator when it comes to actually doing assignments. Then there is a point every so often where I just buckle down and get heaps of work done. Today was that day. I achieved a lot in regards to my assignments. However this is also bad news because it means that I have not had time to start work on my Network Media task.
I have decided that for my Network media task I will be writing a story about a few friends who decide that its going to be a game night. However they are all very busy on the particular day with things such as work, uni, and one guy is even proposing to his girlfriend. However they make a pact that they will all meet up at the designated point in the evening. The story takes place jumping between their days and the hardships they face during the day trying to make the game night. It will be a comedy story (at least ill try to make it funny) and will span Canberra and surrounding areas. I am looking forward to making this story come to life in google maps. I like the idea of reading a book and getting sucked into a story while at the same time you can interactively get a picture of where the events are taking place and what it looks like. I thought about doing a datavisualization but decided that it would take up too much time to collect relevant statistics and turn it into something cool.
Seeing as it is the end of the term a lot of my lectures and tutorials have become mainly time to get assessment done. Which is good however my Japanese class is still going full steam ahead. I left this blog last night because I had other things to do and now I find myself sitting here not remembering what the hell I wanted to talk about. So I might leave it here for this week. I have an essay to write tonight that is due for friday and I am running off little sleep. Just gotta love the uni life ay.
WHOA! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY BLOG! Some of you might be thinking. Then again other people might never have been before and have no idea what im talking about. So to let you all know what im going on about I finally decided to download a template and change the style of my blog. Ever since I created my blog back in the day I had been using the same old boring, some would say ugly, style and coloring. With this new template I have taken some positive steps on the way to coolness.
The semester have been going way to fast for my liking. I have been tied down with alot of assessment. I finally decided to read over the requirements for the blog other then the basic one post a week etc etc. I realised that my blog needed alot of work if I wanted to get good marks. Considering my results from the last assignment I did for Network Media Production I realised I needed to get some good marks. I do not want to just get pass' and finish my degree Im at least aiming to get credits if not better. Getting a pass in the first assignment was not a good step in this direction.
So now that I have changed the layout and had a look at the unit outline I can blog about any thing I want. Ive also decided that in the next couple of weeks im going to go on a blog overhaul. Pretty much meaning I am going over all previous posts and adding some information, labeling them, linking to relevant stuff etc. If I am going to choose three good blog posts to be marked I really need to update.
So in keeping with the theme of assignments I have started to think about the second Network task. Ive been thinking that I will be making a story in google maps. However I have yet to decide if I will be making up something fictional or telling some kind of life story or tour. I think I will need to make some more decisions within the next couple of days on how I will approach this.
Finally I need to make mention of the Japanese oral that I have tommorow. Learning another language is hard especially when doing all the other assignments at the same time. Sometimes I just wish I could comprehend all languages. Then I would never have to worry about Japanese ever again. Oh well when I finally learn how to speak it I will be having a fun time traveling Japan.
Until next time
Peace
Whats happening out there fellow bloggers? To tell you the truth im having an up and down week. Good marks here, bad marks there, not finished tests. Its been an interesting one all around. I ended up doing the quiz today and i got within an acceptable range of guessing Michaels weight. I was pretty happy with this because so far I have been owning these quizes. Today we did an interesting topic in class. We had to talk about multiplicity and create an idea that which uses multiplicity and collective intelligence. My group came up with an idea called Digicity. The basic idea of this was that people would submit building plans to a database. The plans would then be turned into 3d models using software and displayed online. People could vote and rate on designs and create their own Digital City. Some good uses for this would be for people to get their building designs out there, for architects to look at popular designs, or just for some fun. It would require alot of work and intelligence so its pretty much well out of my reach. Unless I decided to dedicate my whole life to it or something. There were also lots of other good ideas presented by other people in my class. I wont go into detail about them just in case they want to keep their ideas secretive. Haha but I think if you go blog surfing you will be able to find all the ideas posted somewhere.
Just to lighten the mood from all this serious talk. If any of you are looking for a good movie to go and watch I recommend Kick Ass. I have seen a few movies lately, for example Clash of the Titans and to be honest not many have been really capturing my attention. However Kick Ass had great elements which kept me interested through the whole thing.
I would also like to mention that there is a new Halo game being released this year and a new Gears of War being released sometime next year. I hate knowing that when these titles come out I still still be at uni and trying to juggle all of my work around having fun.
If any one has any suggestions on some cool movies to watch or any thing like that please leave me a comment. Seeing as we are doing a media class im just gonna assume that at least some of you have some ideas on a good watch.
Until next time
Peace
So the week of relaxation went so quick I almost cant remember that it ever happened. I mean one week off. There was no time for any thing. I worked alot caught up on some sleep and maybe watched a movie or two. There was maybe 2 days out of 7 that I really got to unwind and just enjoy not having to go to uni. This week its straight back into it. I really enjoyed monday being a public holiday because I dont think I would of brought myself to wake up in the morning. The good thing about now is that I can smell the end of the semester. Only a few more pieces of assessment left until the end and I will have completed 1/8 of my course. Hahaha its going to be a long 4 years. Well ive just spent a ridiculously long night at work so im gonna cut this one short for now. Im rather sick of customers coming into work and expecting you to treat them like royalty when all they do is be rude. Any ways bed time for me and another day at uni tomorrow.
Peace
So I finished my hectic week 7 and I was going to blog all about it but ive just spent the last few days being a cool guy and forgot completely about it. I wasnt sure if we were meant to write a blog for this week but heres one anyways. On friday I handed in 3 assessment and then i worked all weekend long. By the time monday came around I was ready to relax. I spent most of this week doing the things I love. Sleeping, xbox, and hanging out with some friends. Only bad thing is that this week cant go for 2 or 3. Oh well I suppose monday is a public holiday so ill be looking foward to that. Any ways ive only got time for a quick blog today. I have to clean my house in preparation for some visitors. My room is terrible. lol Hope youe enjoying your weeks as much as I am!
So I wasn't quite sure if we were meant to do 2 post this week including the one for our rationale so I figured I would be better safe then sorry. This week has been the worst/hardest week of uni I have ever had. It started off with an oral being due which I am quite sure did not go so well. Followed by having 3 assignments all due this friday. Fortunately today I managed to have one assignment complete which was the network media production A. I posted it online and immediately set out to finish the other two. One of the two I have left requires me to use photoshop which is really troublesome. On tuesday I could not find a spare computer and I really needed to get some work done on it. Im banking all my marks on tomorrow by going into uni early to find a computer. I know exactly what I want to do to it I just need to find a computer. This assignment I am not too worried about. The final assignment that I have due is this stupid annotated bibliography for international studies. I have to choose 6 references and talk about them. I found one reference and talked about it and thought wow this assignment is in the bag. It won't take me more then 2 or 3 hours. 4 hours later and i had only found two more sources to write about and I immediately regretted my comment. The assignment is fairly straight forward I just need to find the relevant information.
All in all this has been such a terrible week. I have been trying to think of way in which to celebrate (time that could of been better spent working on my assignments). What I came across could possibly be the best celebration ever! Here.Just get naked. Haha but by this time tomorrow all my assignments will either be done or late and I will be feeling good about myself. The week of uni break is going to be very nice.
Peace
For my Production A Networked Media assignment I decided to create an online exhibition. The topic I chose to create this exhibition on was Anime and I decided that I would write reviews for various anime I had watched. At first I considered doing a series of blog posts but I honestly just do not like blogs. My next option was to create a website which I thought would be a better idea because I was interested in learning HTML. My main aim when creating this website was for it to be as straightforward as possible so the reader could get the information they wanted without any difficulties. In order to do this I had a standard black background, and an easy to read font. I set it out in a user friendly format with the links to the left side of the page, a heading picture up the top and all the main information down the middle. I also decided that I would link all my pictures back to their original sources so that people could navigate to these sites and view other pictures of interest of download the specific picture if they wanted to. I also decided to add a video down the bottom of all the pages to create interest and give the reader a bit of understanding of the reviewed shows.
I have also created links to other sites in the area that my website relates to. For example I linked it to an online anime streaming site and some sites that give specific information about anime. I also linked it to my blog because if I ever did post something like this online, if viewers liked my reviews they might also like my blog and could visit it.
I have visited quite a lot of anime review sites in my time because I generally like to look at other people’s opinions before I start to watch one. This goes for many other areas of Media, as I like to look at reviews for movies, music, games etc. The thing that I really dislike a lot about these sites is their layout is sometimes really congested. They have a lot of ads and links happening and then the information is in a little box that you have to squint your eyes at to read. I took this into account when I made my website so the information was nice and easy to read.
Another thing that I do not like about other review sites is that critics are usually really harsh. Speaking for myself and others that I have talked to about this, critics just seem to only find the bad points in things. They seem to overlook a lot of the positives. With my reviews I tried to get a happy medium between talking about the good and the bad points in all my reviews.
This was pretty much the first time that I had used HTML so when I started the production of this website my skills were non-existent. I picked up things slowly and had a lot of trouble trying to get certain parts of code to work. There was this one time that I spent 2 hours in the tute trying to figure out how div tags worked. By the end of the tute I just had no idea what the problem was an no one could shed any light on it. When I got home later that day I opened it up again and low and behold it was working. I also had a lot of difficulty trying to embed youtube videos in my html. I was looking up all this code on various tutorial sites. I could not get it to work so I asked a friend and he told me that youtube is very HTML friendly. You just right click on the video you want and an option comes up to copy embed code. You then paste this code on the HTML and your set. Whilst working on my website I encountered many problems like this and through online tutorials and help from classmates I slowly started to understand HTML a lot better. One website which gave me a lot of help was called w3schools. It pretty much had most of the information you could ever need to create both HTML and CSS aspects of a webpage.
Some of things that I would of liked to have done on my website was to create some drop down menus or some kind of javascript. For example a rollover feature where the picture gets larger or some sort of user search directory. I have also been working on making me own anime video compiled of different clips from different animations. I have been working on this for 2 months in my spare time but its no where near finished. These kinds of things I would of liked to have incorporated but due to skill level and lack of time I had to make some choices to make finishing the site realistically possible.
Overall I am very happy with how my final product turned out. Although I did no manage to finish it in the sense of doing everything I wanted, I created a polished product with what I could manage. I have also gained a greater understand on how HTML works even if it is not my favourite thing in the world.
Ohayoo Gozaimas
Or at least thats what I'd say to any of you out there who speak Japanese. Thursdays is really my long day of uni. Wake up at 7 30 to get ready. Drive from yass to Canberra start at 9 30 and finish at 5. Only to come home as quick as I can to go to work. I decided to skip my lecture this afternoon so i could have a little down time before work, but i find myself sitting here writing my blog anyways.
After spending the last week trying to figure out my assignment I have finally started to make some progress towards it looking half good. Not as much time has been put into it as i would of liked but what can you do when nearly every class I attend has an assignment due in week 7 (in some cases 2). We looked at each others blogs today in class and I have decided that in the weeks break of week 8 I am going to try and stylize my blog better. At the moment its just so simple and honestly rubbish looking. It needs a change from the bland colours and simple format. That being said I can only do as much as my technical skills allow. The good thing is that after next week I will have had 5 assessment items out of the way. During the second half of this semester I will be able to start paying more attention to things such as my blog. As with many assignments I have done I always find myself wishing i had just one more week to make it better. So for the next week I will be sleeping, going to uni, going to work and in all my spare time inbetween I will be working on all my various assignments. Hopefully I can get them all done and of good quality before the dreaded deadline.
How many of you have been sitting down writing some HTML and for some reason none of it seems to work? I decided to give my assignment a start the other day and it was going along quite nicely. I was just doing small things here and there putting in some content etc. Then all of a sudden a huge list of problems occured and it made me realise that HTML just decides somettimes if it wants to work or not. Ill save a bunch of code and it will be all good. Then next time i will open it up and there will be a problem. In class today I spent 2 hours trying to get div tags to work. I looked online. Didnt work. I looked at a friends. Didnt work. I asked for help from the tutor. Didnt work. Got another guy from the class to help. He couldnt figure it out. I leave the class feeling utterly defeated. Get home and decide to email the problem to the tutor so she could look at it. Open up my file in safari and for some unknown reason it decided that it wanted to work now. I mean i wasted 2 hours of my life on some code that just decided that it didnt want to work until i got home. Damn you HTML. Other then these massive struggles i have been having the process of making a webpage is rather interesting. Choosing a topic, finding pictures and videos, matching backgrounds with colors and fonts. Its been pretty engaging even if i have been "borrowing" my code from everywhere i can get my hands on it. Well im off to bed now but hopefully tomorrow my code decides it wants to work and i can get some solid work happening on my website.
This week started with my beloved bass amp breaking. After much sorrow its been sent off and I am still wondering when it will be sent back to me. Not the thing I wanted to be worrying about in between uni classes. Tuesday brought my first long day of the week. Early classes not many breaks and a long shift at work straight after uni. I have to admit during our network Media lecture I was finding it rather hard to pay attention. All this talk about HTML, CSS, XML, API, REMIX, AND MASH UP really does my head in. I mean yes I do find it rather cool but every code I seem to touch just breaks.
On came wednesday my day off during the week. I tried to get as much work as I could done on this day but like many others I didn't really achieve much. Which makes me panic cause I have a boatload of stuff to do by week 7 and its going to mean I put in some extreme hours soon. Wednesday night I played in my tough football final and we lost.... Not much to say there except... well we lost. Wednesday night just freed itself up for me which means ill be cramming more uni work in there.
Thursdays seen my next long day of the week. Another early start (doesn't help that I have to drive from Yass everyday,) and I had a Japanese test in the morning. Im pretty sure the test involved all the content that I was a bit iffy about so it will be interesting to see the results. Had my network media tute in the middle of the day which completely did my head in. I spent two hours trying to get a div tag to work properly. I managed to make it half work but couldnt get it all happening. Then a lecture in the afternoon and another long night at work.
My weekend saw me work every night, including tonight. Today is going to be a big session for me trying to get some work done. Starting with this blog then moving onto my Project A assignment. Im so happy tomorrow is a holiday cause I know I really need the time off to get some of my work under control.
Until next time.
yanR
So yet another week of uni has passed, im sitting in my room on a sunday and thinking to myself THE BLOG. All week I have thought about putting another post up here but it generally takes me until the last minute to achieve any thing. During this week we learnt about HTML, XML and CSS. Pretty much these are just a bunch of fancy acronyms to try and make the www all cool. The best thing with acronyms is that people always figure out a way to make them funny. This ensures that we will all learn them very fast. I mean I definitely know How To Meet Ladies so some would say im rather proficient in some forms of HTML. But seriously HTML stands for Hyper Test Markup Language. Its the way in which you write text so a machine reads it and converts what it sees into what you are trying to create. Possibly the best thing about HTML and the web, in my opinion, is how you can view the source code on every page you go to. By clicking on the source code you can have a look at the HTML that was used to create the site. This is a great way to learn and brush up on some HTML skills of your own. We also learnt a but about XML which means Extensible Markup Language and CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheet. We didn't really go into XML much but CSS is a style sheet which you can use to format your webpage.
HTML + CSS = Magic
Whilst on my journey to learn more about HTML I found a really useful website. It has a list of HTML tags, examples, ideas and even has a color list. The link can be found HERE.
After learning about HTML in the lecture and thinking OMG, WTH, ROFLcopter (acronyms people acronyms this is the age of technology and shortening everything down) I turned up to the tute knowing it was going to be a long 2 hours. We had to write a proposal for an assignment in HTML making a very basic webpage. This proved to be frustrating as like many other times I have written HTML I got the code wrong somewhere and had to scour my page looking for it. Finally I found what was wrong and it ended up looking half decent.
Any ways its about time that I go put some time into readings and readings and probably .... some more readings. Remember to close you tags people. It could save hours off your life.
Peace
So now that I have arranged my blog a bit better I figure its time to get down to business.
Some of you may be thinking to yourself, why did you choose blogger? Well it's a good question and I put alot of thought into making my final decision on which site I was going to use to write my blogs. Firstly there was all the information that Michael Honey gave us in the lectures. He named four potential blog sites that we could look at mentioning Wordpress to be a bit more customizable but trickier to use, down to tumblr which is easy to use but give you much less choice. Considering the fact that I'm a first time blogger I did not think that I would venture into trying any thing too difficult. I read over the unit outline a fair bit and Typepad was seeming like the best choice. This was until I turned up for my first tutorial for the unit. There was alot of discussion within my tutorial group as to which site was best for hosting our blogs. There seemed to be a fairly even spread over the four sites that were mentioned in the lecture. People had chosen tumblr for its simplicity while others had gone for Wordpress because the other three did not have as many options as they would like. My tutor Sharon had signed up for three of the sites just to give us a look in on how they operated. At this stage my mind was made up on using typepad until another member of the class talked about how she personally felt that Typepad did not get as much traffic as the other sites on the list and was less search engine friendly. This gave me even more things to think about. In the end, as you would have noticed already, I signed up for blogspot. Mainly because its simple to use, has a moderate range of customization and is a fairly popular blogging site.
All that being said I am still trying to get a good design happening on my page. If any of you blog readers out there see something you think looks absolutely appalling please leave me a comment and telling me why and I may change it. I do not usually have a knack for these kinds of things and any feedback would be greatly appreciated in helping me make a blog that will hopefully stand up to all the assessment criteria.
Oh and add me to your blog roll. I know you want to =)
Welcome to my blog.
First of all I would like to say that this is my first ever attempt at blogging. So you will probably notice alot of change in the general layout, colouring etc. over the next few days to weeks.
I have joined the world of blogging due to a course that I am studying at University of Canberra, Networked Media Productions.
