Hard to believe assessment 2 is actually upon us, it felt like only yesterday I was on class being marked on the first assessment, but I guess thats because it was at the start of this term as apposed to the end of last term. I have to say if there's one thing I'm glad to have learnt more than anything in this subject its how handy html is. I mean I know its been around for a while but I can't stop using links in everything I put on the net now, I don't know why I find it so cool. This isn't to say that I haven't stunbled accross anything else cool, but for me learning basic html was a standout.
The first thing one might notice about my blog is how its changed, oh yes I went to work on it, and I think it looks quite good. The light blue and white colour scheme is something I've been cooking up for a while as I'm big fan of these too colours together. Ofocurse being the monkey house I had to refer back to my theme so I layed an image of cartoon monkeys onto the background. A few adjustments here and there and overall I'm pretty happy with the look and layout of my blog however I'm sure it will evolve in future. One thing I've concentrated on throghout the semester on my blog is to make the posts as colourful as possible, by way of pictures and how they complement the text. A colourful picture can enhance the reader's appreciation of a post as apposed to one with just text. Its also important to incorporate the picture into the text. Some posts the picture was wedged between the text such as here and in others it was amongst the text such as here. I think consistency is an important thing in blogs so I tried to keep a similar format for each post that I made, the most obvious being my top ten film list. Every entry had its postion, name and year released as the post title followed by a picture, then the text, then a video link. I tried to give each entry atleast three paragraphs, any less wouldn't have been substantial enough and any more would've of turned away the casual reader. Even if all reader's looked at were the pictures and maybe the video links at least the post has attracted some attention, if they'd read the actual text in the post then that would be a bonus.
Regretably I didn't get to spend as much time on my flicr as I would have liked but during the term I got to put up some good snapshots dealing with website aesthetics, not only did this introduce me to the some cool sites thanks to technorati's top 100 but it also taught me a thing or two about what makes a web site look good. I'm still yet to find this thing which I assume is another account I would have to sign up for. I think the site that I most wish my blog looked like is this one. This semester has been all about community and interactivity with other peoples web identitys and probably the best interativity that I had with others was sharing pictures with Flickr. It was just so cool to be able to find pictures that others had shared from say a concert which you were at also and compare their photos to yours. I found flickr accounts of very gifted photographers and some photos I even favourited such as this one. Organisation is very important in Flickr as the vistor wants to be able to navigate through what they are most interested with the greatest of ease and this is where sets comes in handy. Unfortuntely the free version of Flickr only lets you have three sets but it was fun while it lasted I guess. Labelling sets with short, concise titles as well as giving a good background information on what the set is all about does't hurt either. Here's my favourite set that I made this semester. Flickr has opened out a whole new world in image browsing for me especially for band photography, I will continue to upload many more photos of my own as well as scour Flickr for as many other gems as I can.
Del.ici.ous is something I never saw the point of, I mean saving bookmarks is what my firefox browser is for right? Well yes but the whole point of del.ici.ous is to share your bookmarks with others, once I worked this out I acknowledged Del.ici.ous as being a very helpful tool for internet browsing. Whenver I came across a link that I thought someone else might like I saved it for them and quite often I would have links saved for me. Sometimes you'll come accross somoenes whos saved you a really popular site that only a person living under a rock wouldn't of heard about (can you believe people bookmark google?) but most of the time I stumble across interesting and helpful sites which I never even knew existed. I've been lost for hours on going from one bookmark to another. Bundles also make things a whole lot easy as I found out the hard way, you see I didn't start bundling my tags until quite late in the game so it took quite some time to categorise all my links into several helpful headings. I'm going to work more with delicious in the future as I don't think I've quite taken full advantage of its abilities just yet.
I can't see myself simply walking away from the online community I've created this semester, not only would it only render all the work I have done this year useless but it would prevent me from getting the most out of the internet. Which has a LOT to offer, thats for damm sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment