What I Have Learnt!

Oh my!
What have i learnt?!
Well a lot i must admit.
Every site we interacted with was a new experience to me, including Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, Technorati... Although i did know about Gmail, i mean it is the best email service around. I also learnt how to use new programs such as Fetch and iWeb and combined these to create my website.
At the beginning i had no idea how to customise my Blogger, now i have created a blog that is completely my own. I have changed the background to a photo by Greg Martin. The post backgrounds have been changed to a grunge picture while the sidebar was changed to a plain black background. I have changed the fonts and their colours. I added some fancy green fishes up the top as well as various RSS feeds. These feeds include the MPI104 blog, my Delicious account, a gaming channel from Technorati, Doghouse comics and Geekologie. So you know, just a couple. A counter can also be found under the Blog Title. All this was learnt over weeks from my lecturer Damien and also researching on the internet.
I have learnt how to use Flickr and found how it would be useful to people such as myself when trying to get certain artworks noticed.
Delicious has been helpful in that i can have all my bookmarks with me at any computer, its especially good when you can't remember the bloody website address your looking for.
When using iWeb to create my website i found it fairly easy to do the basics, it was when i had to add the RSS feed and the counter i did have a little trouble but i quickly managed to work it out. The program does have a lot of limitations but i was glad we used it and saw what it could over. Fetch at first made me nervous but then i realised how easy it was to add files and whatnot so that was good. Its extremely handy going to class to see how to do things, haha.
This course was pretty fun, i really enjoyed it and did learn a fair lot. Thanks Damien.

Here are my sites:

Athene

Flickr

Delicious

Blog

Technorati

Technorati is a search engine for online blogs. You can put any keyword or topic into the search engine and it will come up with either blogs or posts to do with that topic. You can also look through various channels like the gaming channel to which i have an RSS feed on my blog. It's a great site for finding new information and more variations.

I have added the mpi104 blog as an RSS feed on my blog, as well as my Delicious account and also the gaming channel on Technorati. I have other RSS feeds on my blog just for interest sake, like Geekologie and a random comic strip.

Counters and RSS

The Counters feature allows you to see how many people have looked at your website, the most popular pages of your website, commonly used keywords and so on. Other web analysis tools include search bars, such as the google search bars.
I have added a fancy new counter to my blog, haves a look!!

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way to see a variety of updated feeds. Blogs and News websites are just two examples that use RSS to update their site.
RSS can be used to keep you up to date with various websites in an easily structured way.
Google reader combines all your RSS feeds so that you can look at everything in the one page.

File Transfer Protocol!

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a common network protocol. It is a simple way to exchange files between computers on the internet. It manages to do this by using TCP/IP protocols. FTP is often used to download programs.

Advantages of FTP:

• FTP allows you to continually update websites at any time.
• You can transfer files from one computer to another.
• It is fast and an efficient way to transfer large files over the internet.

Disadvantages of FTP:

• You have to remember to back up everything!
• It costs to have your own space on the web.
• The connections can be unreliable and can often time out.
• It has minimum data security features.

So we made two web pages connecting to each other through Microsoft Word. It was pretty damn simple!

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.