Assessment #1: the journey so far...

So here we are at the first assessing stage of MPI104, man am I sick of writing that subject code as a tag for pretty much everything this past term or so. Adding tags isn't the only thing I've been doing in this class so far...

Starting with good ol' Flickr which to begin with I was a bit skeptical about. I mean I immediately assumed that it would have a large amount of crap on it but what I realised was that thats what the whole internet is, a bunch of crap. The way you find the good stuff is by sorting through all the crap, and with effort comes rewards. So far I've uploaded three sets of photos, not as much as I would of liked but I've discovered that I really like flickr, especially after I'd added myself to a few groups and got my contact lists beefed up. I commented on a few pictures and even selected a few favourites while cruising around through the immense library of photos that can be found. In terms of my own photos I tried to limit them down to only things that would be interesting to others, that is, even if they knew nothing about me or my friends they might still be able to get a kick out of the images. I gave them all titles and descriptions and all that jazz and forwarded a few to the MPI104 group as well as a few others. Here's my favourite set of pics after I discovered the amazing face morpher.

Delicious, for me, was a bit of a waste as I could never find cool enough websites to bookmark and if I did I'd find that many others had got in before me. I didn't see the point of adding common sites that any idiot could find, i wanted ones that were hard to find and would be useful to people. I joined up to a network with almost all my workshop class and saved bookmarks for others whom I thought would enjoy them. I made sure to bookmark all my actual blog posts on my delicious as a quick way for people to find them. Tags were also used extensively, I made sure to bundle them and also subscribe to a couple which were of interest to me. I also chucked my flickr and blogger bookmarks up on there to make sure everyone would have a look if they wanted. Getting the RSS feed up onto my blog was a bit tricky but in the end it was pretty straightforward, I just wasn't looking in the right places. I hope to spend a lot more time on delicious, the webs a big place and I'm sure there's some cool stuff out there waiting for me to discover and tag.

Now to blogger which is where I, like most people I'm guessing, spent most of my time. I did 17 posts in total and the whole html thing is actually really fun and I can't believe I haven't done it in blogs before now as they really do add to the depth of them. I also put plenty of pictures in my posts as they helped brighten things up a bit. A little way through I decided to do a top 10 film list and as part of each entry I put a you tube player window into the post showcasing a scene from the chosen film. I'm glad I did the top 10 thing because it related back to my strongest interest and let me explain my reasoning behind each entry. In case you were wondering here's what ended up at number one. I worked a bit on my profile and found a nice little pic to put as my display image. I chucked a bunch of links to other blogs, mostly proddies ones, down the sidebar and created a list as a page element detailing the fictional rules from the movie Fight Club. I signed up to Technorati and added their stuff to the sidebar as well as a little counter at the bottom of the page. I played around with templates/fonts/colours to get the exact look I wanted and I made an effort to see as many other peoples blogs and comment on them as possible. Overall I tried to be as interesting as possible with my blog, I do hope some people bothered to check it out.

So there it is. Everything that I can think of at this point in time that I accomplished these past couple of months in MPI104. I'm not afraid to say that I've actually learnt some things during the process also...