... Sitting here in the Mac lab.. listening to the loud music coming from Final Fling at the Crow Bar.
siiiigggggh
What a great way to spend my Wednesday night
That said, I hope all of the animators are ready for an amazing party next week when we've all finished our assessments!!
xx
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Finale...?
Emm Pea Eye One Oh Four…
We’ve reached the end of an exciting and enlightening semester of Multimedia; and so, its time to surmise all the wonderful things that we have discovered.
Our first steps were to create a Google account. Although I was already familiar with Gmail, I DID learn that I could change my Gmail layout to be all spacey and awesome. I also learnt that Google has a bajillion different facets to it.. like Docs, Reader, and Blogger.
In the week we started using Blogger, I learnt some of the HTML basics, such as making a link and making a simple webpage in notepad. We had a bit of a play with templates and aethetics in Blogger as well. Although you could use HTML to modify the blog, I chose not to because I was afraid I would break it.. lol
Over the semester, we signed up for a bunch of different websites; Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati. I learnt a bit about how tags and tagging works, as these sites all rely on tags for searching and indexing.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much use out of any of these three, as there are MUCH better image hosting sites, I don’t use bookmarks much, and I don’t blog.. XD
The end of semester was a bit more intense, with making an iWeb page and working with RSS and FTP. RSS was pretty interesting. I had come across the term heaps of times before but I have never bothered to check it out. Using Google Reader is really useful for checking websites for updates and stuff, so that was cool.
I had a vague idea about FTP, but I had never actually used an FTP client like Fetch before.
Learning iWeb was not the most fun thing in the world, but I somehow managed. Because of its simplicity, it doesn’t provide enough options for really fiddley stuff, OR it adds in extra bits and pieces you can’t remove. Siiggh.
Anyway, This topic was a really good introduction, and I can see how many of these topics would lead onto advanced things, like creating advanced websites and stuff.
Woohoo bring on MPI110 :D
xx
We’ve reached the end of an exciting and enlightening semester of Multimedia; and so, its time to surmise all the wonderful things that we have discovered.
Our first steps were to create a Google account. Although I was already familiar with Gmail, I DID learn that I could change my Gmail layout to be all spacey and awesome. I also learnt that Google has a bajillion different facets to it.. like Docs, Reader, and Blogger.
In the week we started using Blogger, I learnt some of the HTML basics, such as making a link and making a simple webpage in notepad. We had a bit of a play with templates and aethetics in Blogger as well. Although you could use HTML to modify the blog, I chose not to because I was afraid I would break it.. lol
Over the semester, we signed up for a bunch of different websites; Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati. I learnt a bit about how tags and tagging works, as these sites all rely on tags for searching and indexing.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much use out of any of these three, as there are MUCH better image hosting sites, I don’t use bookmarks much, and I don’t blog.. XD
The end of semester was a bit more intense, with making an iWeb page and working with RSS and FTP. RSS was pretty interesting. I had come across the term heaps of times before but I have never bothered to check it out. Using Google Reader is really useful for checking websites for updates and stuff, so that was cool.
I had a vague idea about FTP, but I had never actually used an FTP client like Fetch before.
Learning iWeb was not the most fun thing in the world, but I somehow managed. Because of its simplicity, it doesn’t provide enough options for really fiddley stuff, OR it adds in extra bits and pieces you can’t remove. Siiggh.
Anyway, This topic was a really good introduction, and I can see how many of these topics would lead onto advanced things, like creating advanced websites and stuff.
Woohoo bring on MPI110 :D
xx
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Website That Goes PING
Technorati.
In a nutshell, its a blog search engine. However it also indexes RSS feeds from blogs, as well as tracks outbound and inbound activity around a blog post. It ranks blogs and gives them a number called Authority -- which is determined by the number of unique blogs linked to yours in the past 180 days.
I have an awesome authority of 0, and a rank of 4,814,527.
I don't like Technorati.
Aside from the fact that it wasn't even WORKING in the class we were supposed to sign up for it, its difficult to navigate, and looks like someone puked a packet of peppermint gum all over their monitor.
How is it different from Google? Google is decent, easy to use, doesn't look like garbage, oh and Technorati uses tags and stuff for searching.
So yeah.. that was a very uninteresting week -_-
coming up next.. iweb spectacularity!
xx
In a nutshell, its a blog search engine. However it also indexes RSS feeds from blogs, as well as tracks outbound and inbound activity around a blog post. It ranks blogs and gives them a number called Authority -- which is determined by the number of unique blogs linked to yours in the past 180 days.
I have an awesome authority of 0, and a rank of 4,814,527.
I don't like Technorati.
Aside from the fact that it wasn't even WORKING in the class we were supposed to sign up for it, its difficult to navigate, and looks like someone puked a packet of peppermint gum all over their monitor.
How is it different from Google? Google is decent, easy to use, doesn't look like garbage, oh and Technorati uses tags and stuff for searching.
So yeah.. that was a very uninteresting week -_-
coming up next.. iweb spectacularity!
xx
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Following Protocol
FTP (File Transfer Protocol); pronounced Eff Tea Pea, is a network protocol used to exchange files over a computer network, such as the internet.
What else does FTP do?
Weeeelll....
-- it promotes the sharing of files (data or computer programs)
-- encourages indirect or implicit use of remote computers
-- shields the user from variations in file storage systems
-- transfers data reliably and efficiently :)
Sounds pretty rad you say? I guess so... however! FTP is an inherently insecure method of transferring files. This is because there is no method for transferring data in an encrypted fashion.. which THEN means that things like user names, passwords, and transferred files can be intercepted by anyone on the network using a packet sniffer/analyser (that's a piece of software or hardware which logs traffic passed over a network).
A solution to this is to use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) or FTPS (FTP- Secure), which adds SSL or TLS encryption to FTP.
So why were we talking about FTP?
We used an FTP client called "Fetch" to upload awesome iWeb stuff to our Athene pages on the Uni server :)
You can have a look at my amazing iWeb page here. Make sure you appreciate the RSS feeds and the counter :D But thats next week's stuff heehee
xx
What else does FTP do?
Weeeelll....
-- it promotes the sharing of files (data or computer programs)
-- encourages indirect or implicit use of remote computers
-- shields the user from variations in file storage systems
-- transfers data reliably and efficiently :)
Sounds pretty rad you say? I guess so... however! FTP is an inherently insecure method of transferring files. This is because there is no method for transferring data in an encrypted fashion.. which THEN means that things like user names, passwords, and transferred files can be intercepted by anyone on the network using a packet sniffer/analyser (that's a piece of software or hardware which logs traffic passed over a network).
A solution to this is to use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) or FTPS (FTP- Secure), which adds SSL or TLS encryption to FTP.
So why were we talking about FTP?
We used an FTP client called "Fetch" to upload awesome iWeb stuff to our Athene pages on the Uni server :)
You can have a look at my amazing iWeb page here. Make sure you appreciate the RSS feeds and the counter :D But thats next week's stuff heehee
xx
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Episode 5 -- Recap
MPI104 is a pretty darn cool subject :)
Lets talk about all the stuff we have covered =D
Week 1 was spent understanding the subject, making sure we had an Athene account, and reading the subject outline!
In Week 2 we signed up for a Google account. I already had a Gmail account, so I stuck with using that :). I customised my Gmail page (with the space layout!), signed up to the Australian Holidays and Phases of the Moon on Google Calendar, and learnt about Google Docs, which I had never used before. Its pretty useful for collaboration with people you can’t directly talk to. I wrote more about Google docs in the comment for the Week 2 MPI blog post... I always knew there was heaps to Google, not just a search engine/email, and this was the first time I actually did something outside of that hehe :)
Week 3 was when we started our blog using Blogger. We had a read about blogs and Blogger, but we also had a little bit of a look at HTML—making stuff bold, headings, links etc. We all wrote our first blog posts today :D
Week 4 was probably my least favourite of all. This is when we learnt all the joys of Flickr. We had a read about Web 2.0 and folksonomy; so things like tagging, wikis, collaborative stuff, then we signed up for Flickr; in which I discovered that Firefox doesn’t signing up for a Yahoo/Flickr account. After I got that sorted, I uploaded some photos from the web and stuff I had drawn. I now have a grand total of eighteen pictures! Here’s some pictures I found from the web, and here are some of my awesome drawings.
I added some favourites too from other people; you can have a look at some here, here, and here.
I can’t stand using Flickr. If you want to know more, you can check out my blog post about it.
Onwards!
Week 5 was Delicious. Or .. del.icio.us ... even though it redirects to delicious.com anyway! Bookmarking stuff was really tedious when we had to add each others’ blogs, but I now have 21 bookmarks! The majority are blog pages, but I added some of my most visited stuff to delicious as well. Here are three of my favourites: XKCD, Penny Arcade, and the Animation VFX forum. They interest me because XKCD and Penny Arcade are two of the most awesome webcomics ever, and the Animation VFX forum is pretty important to my course lol.
Week 6 was about CSS and accessibility. We had more writing to do this time L But we also had to play around with the templates for our blog. I started with a bright pink theme... but I chose a different style (green and white background) and changed some of the colours for the headings, and the font to Georgia, to make it look cleaner.
Week 7 was revision!!
And so that leaves me here, Week 8 writing my 5th blog post. I’m not sure which one of my posts is the most interesting. Perhaps you feel like reading about my Flickr rage, or check out the cool links I posted when I wrote about Delicious :D
I didn’t use many tags because my blog is pretty small, but they’re quite relevant to their respective topics :P For example, my post on CSS is tagged with: CSS, cascading style sheets, and HTML, because that’s what I talked about.
Other work I’ve done in Blogger are commenting other peoples posts (which you can have a looksee at some of the better ones here and here) as well as fix up my profile, and follow other people’s blogs.
Anyway, I’ve written a lot
I hope that covers everything!
xx
Edit :: uhmm did anyone else get any HTML errors when they tried to post their blogs?? :( !!
Lets talk about all the stuff we have covered =D
Week 1 was spent understanding the subject, making sure we had an Athene account, and reading the subject outline!
In Week 2 we signed up for a Google account. I already had a Gmail account, so I stuck with using that :). I customised my Gmail page (with the space layout!), signed up to the Australian Holidays and Phases of the Moon on Google Calendar, and learnt about Google Docs, which I had never used before. Its pretty useful for collaboration with people you can’t directly talk to. I wrote more about Google docs in the comment for the Week 2 MPI blog post... I always knew there was heaps to Google, not just a search engine/email, and this was the first time I actually did something outside of that hehe :)
Week 3 was when we started our blog using Blogger. We had a read about blogs and Blogger, but we also had a little bit of a look at HTML—making stuff bold, headings, links etc. We all wrote our first blog posts today :D
Week 4 was probably my least favourite of all. This is when we learnt all the joys of Flickr. We had a read about Web 2.0 and folksonomy; so things like tagging, wikis, collaborative stuff, then we signed up for Flickr; in which I discovered that Firefox doesn’t signing up for a Yahoo/Flickr account. After I got that sorted, I uploaded some photos from the web and stuff I had drawn. I now have a grand total of eighteen pictures! Here’s some pictures I found from the web, and here are some of my awesome drawings.
I added some favourites too from other people; you can have a look at some here, here, and here.
I can’t stand using Flickr. If you want to know more, you can check out my blog post about it.
Onwards!
Week 5 was Delicious. Or .. del.icio.us ... even though it redirects to delicious.com anyway! Bookmarking stuff was really tedious when we had to add each others’ blogs, but I now have 21 bookmarks! The majority are blog pages, but I added some of my most visited stuff to delicious as well. Here are three of my favourites: XKCD, Penny Arcade, and the Animation VFX forum. They interest me because XKCD and Penny Arcade are two of the most awesome webcomics ever, and the Animation VFX forum is pretty important to my course lol.
Week 6 was about CSS and accessibility. We had more writing to do this time L But we also had to play around with the templates for our blog. I started with a bright pink theme... but I chose a different style (green and white background) and changed some of the colours for the headings, and the font to Georgia, to make it look cleaner.
Week 7 was revision!!
And so that leaves me here, Week 8 writing my 5th blog post. I’m not sure which one of my posts is the most interesting. Perhaps you feel like reading about my Flickr rage, or check out the cool links I posted when I wrote about Delicious :D
I didn’t use many tags because my blog is pretty small, but they’re quite relevant to their respective topics :P For example, my post on CSS is tagged with: CSS, cascading style sheets, and HTML, because that’s what I talked about.
Other work I’ve done in Blogger are commenting other peoples posts (which you can have a looksee at some of the better ones here and here) as well as fix up my profile, and follow other people’s blogs.
Anyway, I’ve written a lot
I hope that covers everything!
xx
Edit :: uhmm did anyone else get any HTML errors when they tried to post their blogs?? :( !!
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Cascading Style Sheets (Resonance or otherwise)
CSS is really really good.
Without CSS, websites would be ugly.
But seriously, its useful because you can make changes to whole websites with global stylesheets. Isn't that cool? Also it uses less bandwidth and its really flexible!
Hooray! It makes life simple!
In case you couldn't tell, I changed my blog layout. Its got a bunch of different templates to pick from, and you can change the colour of your text, the linkies, headers, etc. You can rearrange the different parts of the blog too, and add games and stuff! But I didn't really change that. Just a new template and some colour changes hehe.
It doesn't let you customise templates further.. I'm stuck with green. blue, or pink :(
I guess thats the point of a template though.. so you don't have to do much work. And I have no idea how to make a cool background or awesome headers and stuff with HTML. I guess I'm stuck with whatever I'm given :'(
Lets talk about accessibility.
Basically, accessibility refers to making something available to everyone. In website design, it includes things like making stuff easy to read for the visually impaired, as well as being compatible across different web browsers. This is important because.. if you don't make something easily accessible, nobody is going to check it.
Anyway.. yay!
xx
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
delicious nutritious
I like it :)
Although I don't really bookmark many things anyway, I can see how it could be useful.
Its actually good for this subject because it means I can keep track of everyone's blog links.
I haven't really had the time to check out the whole site, but its pretty easy enough to add links and tags.
The only problem I have would be the teeny tiny button for "save new bookmark"..
.. seeing as thats the WHOLE POINT of delicious, shouldn't it be bigger?
Maybe I'm just splitting hairs =/
Here be a linky to my delicious account.
--megan xx
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