Week 7 – Templates and CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a powerful tool for customising webpages. It obviously focuses on the style of the webpage, like the layout, fonts and colours. The benefits of CSS includes the customisation of websites, this allows people to change sites such as blogs to fit their own personality and requirements. If you customise a webpage properly you can adjust all the pages connected to it to have a consistent template. Another benefit is the accessibility it has especially for those that may be blind or hearing impaired. If web designers consider accessibility for their websites they are more likely to gain a wider audience.
When you change your template the information you have saved does not disappear like it once did. You can change the page around to your liking. There are certain restrictions for templates which don't allow you to customise certain areas.
This week we changed a few things on our blog to ease into editing webpages, i changed the colours within my template to more of a green theme since that is my favourite colour. Hopefully when we learn more the page will hardly resemble the original blogger template.

Assessment

Over a few weeks i have learnt about websites that i never knew existed or didn't believe i needed to explore them. After learning about them and what they could offer i have begun using them and believe they will come in handy especially further in my studies. I have made a html page, created blogs, uploaded images to Flickr and bookmarked various sites on Del.icio.us. So here is the Information needed for my assessment!

Blogger

• I have made 4 posts, most including links. One of my more interesting posts involves my Flickr post.
• I chose a colourful blog with different coloured headings and fonts. I also put a Display Picture up of one of my favourite drawings.
• I have commented on 3 student blogs, including Aidan, Mazzy and Becca. Becca having one of my more interesting comments.
• I have started to follow other blogs from members of my group and also made some friends. I have edited my profile as well.

Del.icio.us

• I have 17 Bookmarks.
  
• These bookmarks interest me because they are of blogs of people i know, i also have the interact bookmarked so that i can access that horrible site when i need to. I have my flickr account and also the mpi104 blogspot bookmarked so that i don't have to remember the url. I added some less related websites which i'm really interested in, these include DeviantART and Geekologie.
  
• Links to my 3 fav websites from Del.icio.us: My Flickr Account; Geekologie and DeviantART.

Flickr

• I have uploaded 3 photos from my trip to Melbourne. I only wanted to put photos up that were interesting and not fill flickr with crappy photos that no one wants to really look at.
• Here is a link to my 3 favourite photos from Melbourne.

Gee i hope i didn't miss anything!

Bookmark Heaven!

Here are 3 other websites which allow you to bookmark different sites, just like Del.cio.us!

Google Bookmarks

Diigo

Mister Wong


Edit: Commented on Mazzys Blog.

Mmm Del.icio.us!

Well! I didn't know anything about Del.icio.us, like i had NO idea what the hell it was and why it was called delcious especially when it didn't have anything to do with food, although i guess it could involve food if you bookmark recipe pages. But now that i know what it is it's a pretty handy tool for someone who loves to bookmark pages. There seems to be no limit to how many websites you can tag. You can search within the site for different pages, these pages are reccomended by the users within Del.icio.us so in some ways it can be more reliable or relevant then google when searching for particular websites. I also made a network, which allows you to find people and share eachothers bookmarks around. Here is a link to my Del.icio.us Account.

It also seems that we have to keep a record on who we post comments to soooo from today i have commented on Aidans, i'll have to get around more i guess!

Flickr!

Flickr is a great site for finding really quality photos. It reminds me of a photo-only version of DeviantART, although i find that DeviantART has better search options. The interestingness tool is a good idea, it allows you to skip the mediocre photos and look at the better photos from the last 7 days. The navigation around the website isn't too bad either, it is pretty simple after you have a brief look around.
I uploaded a few photos from one of my previous trips to Melbourne and created a set for them called the Melbourne Set.

Here is one of the photos i had taken:

I joined some groups including Artistic Photography, Long Exposure and Mountain and Water. I also added some favorite photos from other flickr members, the quality of some are just unreal.

Here is the link to my main Flickr page: MissChamploo