Assessment #2

So, we've come to the end of the subject, and the semester, and this is the last assessment.

What have I learnt during this subject?

Hmm, well I've done a lot of this kind of stuff before, but I did manage to take some things from what we were taught. But I'll give a general overview of what we did in the semester. First we created a Google/Gmail account, which gave us access to all of the Google applications, like Google Docs and Blogger, which is probably one of the most used things in the subject. We then created a Flickr account, where we could upload photos and images, and I've used that a little bit. I have 63 photos/images up there, all of which are my own work. Next up was del.icio.us, we created an account there which allows us to save bookmarks online so we have them wherever we are, and so that we can tag them and share them with other people. While I had seen del.icio.us around before, I had never actually signed up and used it, so I learnt a little here, and have been using it a bit lately, and have 35 pages bookmarked... should probably have more with how much I use Stumble. Then we looked at CSS... I've been playing with CSS for a couple of years now, so in the brief overview we had I didn't pick anything new up. We then moved on to look at Blogger Templates, which is an extension of CSS, since Blogger uses CSS to lay out content. I've played with the templates before, so again, nothing really new. But I did change the template I'm using a bit... changed fonts, colours, made new images in Photoshop and gave it an overall different look. Meh, it's ok, I guess.

Then we had a look at FTP, which I have been using for quite some time now. So, again nothing new, and since I use a Mac, I already knew how to use Fetch. Ok, something new, which was Technorati. Had never heard of it before, but its basically a blog search engine, which allows you to sign up and link your blog to the service, and then it will rank your blog based on how many links you get to it, and then give a rating called 'authority' based on how many links you have. It also allows you to add favourites and such. My rank at the moment is 2,315,271 and my authority is 1... which isn't the greatest. We then looked at counters, which again is nothing new if you've been on eBay or played around with websites... theres one on my blog here, at the bottom, through Bravenet. Ok, the last thing we looked at was RSS, which again, is something that I knew of, knew what it did, but haven't really used it before. But its quite useful as it can allow you to read through a number of sites in a much shorter time through the use of readers, mainly Google Reader... which I should probably use more often.

I also made a website and uploaded it to my Athene account.

Alcohol...

was a bad choice.

That is all.

Problems

So, I've had a couple of problems with making this site for class and its all to do with RSS. First problem is I can't get the feed from my blogger to load into my site properly, and since I've been using Dreamweaver, the only way I can seem to get it to work is to use XSL and PHP, and I'm pretty sure the CSU webspace won't let you load PHP, besides I suck at PHP anyways. Had the same problem with iWeb, couldn't find any sort of solution to that one on Google... guess I'll keep working on it and hope for the best.

Second problem involves posting a feed from the site to my blogger. Dreamweaver is great, but it doesn't write RSS feeds for you, so I had a bit of a look at how to write an RSS feed and publish it, which seems kind of hard. But yeah, it seems kind of pointless learning it now since I'm not really posting news items or blogs on my site, meaning there would be nothing in the feed. This problem is also present in iWeb, sort of anyways. iWeb will generate an RSS feed for you automatically, but it only does it when you're using the 'blog' template, so again, kind of pointless... maybe its different in iWeb 08 as I'm only using 07.

Meh, the site is here... if anyone cares. (yes, it uses javascript since I couldn't have been bothered to open Flash)

No time for love Dr. Jones

So, I went and saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the other night and even though I love Indy, I was ultimately a little disappointed. Ok, I grew up watching The Last Crusade, I've seen it countless times, and then I eventually saw Raiders and Temple and I love them all, but I had completely forgot about the new one until the other week when I went to see Iron Man (which is awesome, by the way) and saw the trailer for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Before this I had only seen the poster and a couple of on set photos of Harrison Ford in his Indy get up, which didn't really get me hyped for it, considering its been like 20 years since Crusade, and George Lucas' track record with bringing back old movie franchises isn't quite the best. With this trailer and along with re-watching some of the old ones on TV, I got a little hyped up for it, which is my own fault, I don't know why I let myself do it, as it always ends up in disappointment. But it wasn't all bad, there was all the typical cheesy Indy humour, great action sequences, Harrison Ford kicking some ass, and it even had the Janitor from Scrubs in it. But on the other hand, there are the bads.

I'm just going to sum it up here, there are spoilers, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.

The Good:

• It's Indy.
• References to the old movies, ie. the ark, snakes, Marion, Marcus Brody, Paramount logo etc.
• The action sequences were pretty cool.
• John Hurt was pretty good.

I'll probably add more to this list later on when I can remember, or if I see it again soon.

The Bad:

• Dodgy CGI and keying.
• Cate Blanchett's bad accent.
• Shia LaBeouf is too nerdy, scrawny and not bad ass enough to be Indy's son.
• Monkeys!?! C'mon George, give up with the animals/other species/other race helping the protagonists to win a fight.
• The Fridge.
• Indy is old.
• No Nazi's.
• Aliens!?! I thought this was an action/adventure movie, not sci-fi.
• The ending.
• It's a little boring in places.
• No Sean Connery.

Overall, I think things even out, there's good parts, and there's bad parts, but its still pretty enjoyable.

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In other news, one of my housemates got me a belated birthday present. A plush Link from The Phantom Hourglass, since I'm a huge Zelda nerd I think its awesome and love it. I need to play through Wind Waker and Twilight Princess again sometime soon.

This will be mine soon.

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I also played around with the look of the blog. Changed fonts, text colours, played with the css, edited images and stuff. It wasn't much, but it looks a little better. Might do more of a better job with it at a later date, but for now it will do.

Anyways, thats enough of my aimless rambling for now.

Counters and RSS

Counters

A counter is an 'application' or piece of javascript/code that keeps track of how many unique hits you have to your website. They could be useful for seeing how many different people visit your site, and because they also track other statistics, such as where they're from, what browser they're using, and what operating system they use, you could get a very good image of your sites demographic, meaning you could shape content around them. Besides Bravenet and Google Analytics there are a number of other web analysis tools, and some of these are Microsoft Gatineau, Omniture and WebTrends. Many more can be found from a simple Google search.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and basically sends feeds or basic information of what has been updated from a particular website. It can be used to keep track of updates for a number of sites or blogs, meaning that if a site is updated then the RSS will relay that information to your reader or other RSS program, allowing you to view the update, which can come in handy if you regularly visit the same sites, meaning you could save time by having all the content grouped in to the one program/site/application. Something that relies on RSS is Google Reader. It allows you to add a number of different feeds, and it then will allow you to view all of them in one page. It also allows you to tag and share feeds with friends or other people who may have a similar interest.

I'm no good at this...

This is about the third or fourth blog I've attempted to maintain, and they all seem to eventually die out. I either get sick of posting to them, or get self conscience about what I'm posting and think that no one wants to read about my boring life and how nothing that I write is really all that original, which can be sourced from any number of other blogs/sites, as pretty much all I post about is movies, tv, games and music. But considering we're required to post on this blog, I thought I may as well give it a shot this time around as I want to pass the subject, even though it will be pretty much the same sort of posts I've made in the past with other blogs.

So, anyways, not a whole lot has been happening in my life lately... being unemployed makes you lazy and boring. I need to find a job.

But in other news Grand Theft Auto IV has been owning my life lately, since I have plenty of spare time between uni, I have been playing it pretty much non stop. And as such I have finished the game to 100%. Yep, its quite sad, but I certainly got my $140 worth after 63 hours of play time, in about 2 weeks time, and I'm still playing the multiplayer online, which is awesome. So needless to say, I love this game, sure it has its problems, like aiming and shooting (just like every other GTA game), and not having a proper checkpoint saving system during missions, which nearly had me throwing my controller at the TV after about the fourth or fifth try of some missions. But anyways, enough of my rambling about GTA IV.

So yeah, with GTA IV out of the way now, maybe I can concentrate on some uni work, but then again, I am lazy.

Anyways, I'm gonna go and read some more about Eadweard Muybridge and Marcel Duchamp for this essay thats due on Monday, or maybe watch more Veronica Mars, or possibly, and more likely play more GTA IV.

Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine, that searches blogs, obviously. But there is more to it than that. It also has a semi-social networking aspect to the site, which allows you to create a profile and add favourites to your profile. It also ranks and lists blogs based on their authority. So, in these ways its a little different from Google as it gives a ranking based on how many links you have to your blog, that and it only searches blogs.

My ranking at the moment is 5,137,428 and my authority is 1. Ranking is where your blog is placed compared to every other blog based on your authority. Authority is how many links you have to your blog, so the more links you have to it the higher it will be, and as such your ranking will go up as well.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is network protocol that is used to transfer files from one computer to another over a TCP/IP network, usually the internet. It is commonly used to upload websites to a webserver, and Dreamweaver even has its own FTP client built in. It allows you to transfer files to any computer that allows FTP access, so if you have a PC running Windows and your webserver is running Linux, then they can still communicate with each other. It also allows you to resume files, so if something goes wrong while a transfer is in progress you can continue it from where it stopped last.

Some of the negatives about FTP is that it isn't very secure. Passwords and such are sent in clear text, so people looking in could find out passwords easily. FTP can be slow to start a file transfer, due to the amount of commands needed to actually start the transfer, so transferring a lot of files, like a large website could take a while. Also FTP uses more than one TCP/IP connection at the same time, meaning that it could have problems with firewalls and such.

To minimise some of these problems with security you have to use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) or FTPS (FTP over SSL) which add on more security and encryption when transferring files. To minimise the amount of time taken to transfer numerous files, you can archive all of the files in to one file, then extract it remotely. To minimise problems with firewalls and the connections used you need to make sure they are set up properly for FTP.

So, even though FTP is one of the most common ways to transfer files over the internet, it does have its problems with security and efficiency, but it does have its advantages with being able to resume transfers and how it doesn't discriminate against Operating System or computer platform.

Assessment #1

Ok, I have 5 posts on my blog so far. A link to an 'interesting' one is here. I haven't done much to the look of the blog, just played with the layout a little, changed some fonts and text colours around, thats about it. I've made a couple of comments on other people's blogs, not really too interesting, but here is a link to one. I haven't tagged any of my posts, as I forgot to do so after having published most of my posts from Google Documents, where it doesn't give you the option of adding tags. Thats about all I've done with blogger.

I have 24 pages bookmarked on my del.icio.us account, which mostly made up of other people's blogs, and Flickr accounts, but I've also added a bunch of my favourite sites. The sites that I have added, apart from all the blogs and what not, are sites that I visit regularly, and like to keep up to date with. My 3 favourite sites are Kotaku, AbsolutePunk and PALGN.

I have 34 photos uploaded on my Flickr account, which are all my own, from a period of time from early last year, to early this year. My 3 favourites are here, here and here.

Blogger Templates

You can pretty much change everything in the template options of blogger... if you know how they work. Since its not a normal style sheet, it can be a little tricky when playing with the code of the template as things like text colours, fonts and background images are controlled by variables and then called upon in the CSS. But you can change everything about the look of your blog in the template code, from the fonts used, text colour, link colours, background colours and images, and even the layout of the page, but that would require some major recoding.

The only thing I changed on my template was the blog title colour, from the light brown colour it originally was, to black. Not much, but I like it and it was simple to do.

CSS

There are a number of advantages to using CSS.

It allows you to separate the design from the content of the webpage, which allows you to create much cleaner websites. You can use it to control more than one design element at once, so you can say that all the headings are a certain colour and font, but if you want to change that later on, all you have to do is change the code in the CSS and it will change all the other pages controlled by that style sheet.

CSS also allows the designer to implement more than one page design for a website with the use of exteranal style sheets. So you could have the one website, with the same content, but with completely different designs, you can also allow the user to change the style sheet.

It also useful with accessibility, as the CSS is different from the actual content of the webpage, it makes it easier for accessibility programs, such as readers, to view the webpage.

del.icio.us

del.icio.us seems pretty cool. it allows you to bookmark pages, and tag them and share what you like with others... it's like an online social bookmarking tool.

the link to my del.icio.us account is here.



Other websites that allow you to do a similar sort of thing are:

http://www.simpy.com/
http://www.furl.net/
http://www.citeulike.org/
http://digg.com/

Flickr

I've used Flickr in the past, and it's pretty good.

I like how you can tag photos with whatever you want and then search for them. Add certain photos in to pools, allowing you to get your photos seen by more people. Join groups and discussions about pretty much anything. It's just a really good photographic community site.

The link to my Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/waynesaunders/

and here is a photo.

_MG_3601, originally uploaded by wayne.saunders.

First Post

This is the first post for my MPI104 blog. We looked at HTML in class today... it was absolutely thrilling.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page about HTML.