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

Week 2 - Blogs

Afternoon all,

Our Lecture this week was all about Blogs by Nathan McGuinnes, another member of Ice Lab. Although i already knew a bit about Blogs, icertainly didn't realise how popular they were. I also learnt about RSS Feeds. Speaking as someone that views a few diferrent blogs daily, it certainly saves a lot of time being able to scroll down one page to see which ones have been updated. I use Google Reader as a platform to check all my RSS feeds. I was apprehensive at first about writing my own blog, because i wasn't sure if i'd run out of things to say and the fact that several people might read it, but being able to post a few things i'm interested in has made it a bit easier.

This week we had our first Tutorial for Networked Media Production. Our tutor Max (who is the third person from Ice Lab) basically showed us a bunch of really cool Internet sites and we shared sites that we were interested in. We also focused on blogs. It was interesting that most, if not all the people in the tutorial were regular users of Facebook and a lot of people had Blogs. I'm a very regular Facebook user and i read several different blogs but this is my first ever Blog and although it's i'm used to it now, i didn't know what to expect.

I'm a regular viewer of Digg.com, but i also check out a few different sites on a daily basis including: College Humour which is this great American production company that started off on YouTube and daily posts skits and a few other things they find funny.

Trip Advisor is a great blog that people can post Travel advice and stories from around the world. I found it really useful when i travelled around Europe and their forums are really helpful too. I like to keep up to date with what's happening in the U.K. as i lived their briefly and i have friends over there, so i like The Guardian website as it's probably one of the more credible newspapers in the U.K. I also view the Sydney Morning Herald website on a daily basis.

Since today, i've picked up a few others from the Lecture and Tutorial. One of them that i'll be checking daily from now on is Gizmodo. It's a great Aussie Gadget guide with plenty of cool Gadget news as well as news, videos and pictures. My opinions of Blogs has changed over the past few days because although i used to regularly check various blogs, i've certainly been discovering several other cool ones.

-Sean

Week 1

By: cambodia4kidsorg on Flikr (11/10/2006) Some rights reserved.

Hi everyone :-)

Our first Lecture for Networked Media was done by Michael Honey from Ice Lab (a Canberra based Design Studio). Apart from a standard Introduction to the course, including assesment, expectations etc. Michael Honey talked about one of the most major media network: The Internet. I realised even more how Facebook, MySpace, Google and blogs etc. are making the Internet even more popular and powerful, with people using these forms of communication veen more than ever.

I found it really interesting when Michael focused briefly on where the Internet all began, including various diagrams and pictures showing what the Internet used to look and Barner's-Lee original proposal for the Internet.

All in all, I'm looking forward to studying this unit as i've always been highly interested in the different types of media and communication, as well as production. I've never done a Blog before, but i do view several on a daily basis. One that i find really interesting is Digg.com which i was referred to by a friend from the U.K. basically stories are ranked according to how many 'diggs' they recieve from users. They also have a pretty cool Vodcast that i watch weekly. This is one of the funny videos 'dugg' that i noticed this past week- It's by the same people that did 'Jizz in my Pants' - I'm on a Boat - The Lonely Island.

-Sean