Week 16: As the curtain closes... (i.e. Reflective "meta" post)

By: Kristina B on Flikr (7/10/2008) Some rights reserved.

Well, it honestly feels like this semester has gone by very quickly. Although i have always been a regular networked media user, watching several blogs, news sites and a constant participant in social networking, I'm really glad that i've been exposed to several new sites and concepts.

For example, Del.icio.us is the best place to go if you want to share links with friends or just random members of the public and I've started to read this really cool design blog Toxel. Blogger has allowed me to have several gadgets and feeds in my blog so readers are not just confronted with my weekly ramblings. My blog journey has been different throughout the semester. At first i felt it would be a breeze and was relieved at the simple task but after neglecting to post for a couple of weeks i realised that constant note keeping and link collection was needed to keep up. However, i can never say it has been hard keeping a blog, time consuming maybe, but it certainly hasn't been tiresome.

In future blogging, i would like to develop some CSS for my blog, a nicer background and different fonts and maybe even create my own gadgets for the site because the look of my blog is probably my largest self-criticism. I played around with the templates on blogger and felt what i chose was most appropriate for now. I've discovered what a great advertising tool blogging in, if your blog is popular. For instance, popular celebrity blogger Perez Hilton started as a normal guy writing about celebrities, but through self-promotion and popularity, he is not only a celebrity in his own right, but also a multi-millionaire. This, all from spending time at his home computer!

Unfortunately i wasn't able to find a 'visitor counter' gadget to add to my blog, so i am unaware of the traffic that goes through my site. I formally asked permission from the majority of picture/video sources i have used in my blog as well as advertising, so i hope this attracts some traffic as well as adding a 'Subscribe to' feature on my blog. Networked Media has been a really fun unit, i've learnt new things and i look forward to further practising Networked Media. I've nominated the following three posts for assessment as i not only feel they are my best, but they are also my favourite topics from the semester. Ironically they were studied one after another, which probably makes it easier for marking, but is a funny coincidence:

1. Week 10 - Web 2.o
2. Week 11 - Multiplicity
3. Week 12 - Data Visualisation

Happy Holidays and good luck on your exams!
-Sean

Week 3 - HTML & CSS

Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Flickr (05/01/07) Some rights reserved

This week's Lecture with Nathan McGuinness focused on HTML and CSS, which i vaguely knew about but hardly understood. We learnt that HTML is pretty simple to write and because it's the first step in website creation it's important to understand it, even though applications like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the hassle and do it for you. We started off by learning some important terminology - what HTML actually stood for: Hyper Text Markup Language and some popular tags including 'p' for Paragraph and 'img' for Image. I won't go into too much more detail, but i'm glad i learnt exactly what HTML was and how it contributes to website creation. We also learnt briefly about XML or Extensible Markup Language which is basically HTML using further describing language.

Brajeshwar on Flickr (14/08/06) Some rights reserved

I wanted to put relevant pictures/links in my Blog this week so i searched Flickr for some HTML jokes, if you're interested there's a page of them from a Danish web-developer at Justaddwater. In the Tutorial with Nathan we made a website from scratch using HTML and CSS. It was called 'Ice Cream Lab Sandwiches' and we built it from basic HTML and then added CSS files to change the appearance and make the site look a little more interesting. It was quite interesting to build it completely from scratch and it showed me how important it is to get the HTML perfect because if there's even one word slightly mispelt or incorrectly placed, the whole thing just won't work. I'm starting to think about my Project A and i think i'm leaning towards doing an Information Flow for Facebook, but we'll see how that goes.

-Sean