HTML & CSS Coding Fun

Today i discovered HTML coding and had an absolute ball! At first the codes were hell scary and i avoided the task for several weeks. But today I finally made the plunge and dove right in.

Its actually relatively simple once you get your head around the filing system. Colour changes here,text adjusting there, truly amazing. I started off by changing the colours of a few of the textsin my blog, then experimented with the never-ending selection of colours offered by a Hex Code Generator.I discovered that your blog could use any font that was installed into your computer. So i had some fun with that. I changed the header font, posts fonts and gadget fonts. I then uploaded an image of myself into ImageShack and added that as my background. I changed the size of some fonts, the positioning of my background picture. I then gave my fishies some eyes to swim around with. I also changed the blogger tool bar up the top to match in with my page's theme.

Overall I am very pleased with what I have accomplised and what I have learnt in regards to coding and formatting my blog the way I want. There are many codes that I discovered on the internet which I am yet to try, but have every intention of getting around to doing that at some time in the near future.

Semester 1 2010

Over the last term we have learnt many things in MPI104. The main aim of learning all this was to eventually put together a website. Firstly we learnt about CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. CSS was designed to enable separation of document content and document presentation to make modifying the look and layout of your website easier. Next was File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is where we can transfer our files that we create on our computer onto the World Wide Web. We were all given an Athene account to publish our websites too. Next we learnt about adding counters to our websites. This was so we could keep track of how many people actually visited our space. At the moment the counts are only around 80, but the more different and exciting things I add to my website, the more hits I will get… hopefully... We also touched on RSS feeds. These allow you to subscribe to web pages using RSS feeds, and get updates on your webpage when they update theirs. RSS feeds have a monthly subscription cost and are very handy in keeping up-to-date with events and such. We then signed our blogs up to technorati. And because my website is visited very little and not up-dated a lot, I also have no authority in the technorati world. But I did learn that Technorati is a great tool for businesses or even just for a person to keep track of what people are ‘saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time’(Technorati 101). It is a great source that works different to RSS feeds. It reads all WebPages, not just RSS subscribed ones. So eventually after learning all of this info, we were able to create our very own personal webpage using IWeb. Here we added counters, links and even a RSS subscription. All in all it has been a very interesting and useful semester in MPI104.
If you would like to visit my latest website, please feel free to click here !

Technorati

Technorati is a internet search engine that competes with Yahoo and Google. It follows blogs and keeps its followers up-to-date with what is happening in relation to themselves and their business. Similar to the RSS feed, Technorati will alert when changes have been made to other webpages and updates made. For Technorati to follow your web page or blog, you do not need a working RSS feed. Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time.

Your blog will get a ranking. Last year my blog was ranked 4,814,527 in the Technorati radar and had no authority. This number meant that four million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, five hundred and twenty six people either joined before me, and/or have a higher number of links, favourite hits and/or followers then i did.

My 2010 blog is currently awaiting claim review. It is not yet influential on the world. One day....

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Really Simple Syndication

RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works. It allows you to subscribe to feeds from RSS pages which will automatically update when new information is added to the page.
Google Reader is a simple way to subscribe to RSS feeds. All you have to do is go to the Google Reader tab in Gmail and click on the add feed icon. After subscribing you can go through the information you have subscribed to in the Subscription side bar.


Here is the site you use to add an RSS feed to your webpage - Feed2JS

Counters.

Counter are widgets that count the number of hits your web page has had.
You would use counters so you are able to see how popular your web page is. The more views the better. And if your web page is maintaining, increasing or decreasing in visits, you would be able to tell and then take appropriate actions to increase your hits!

There are a few web analysis tools out there, some are; Deep Log Analyzer, Google Analytics, AWStats, W3Perl and Power Phlogger.

File Transfer Protocol.

FTP is is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet.
FTP can be used to easily upload web pages and information to these web pages.
Some positives of FTP are that you can upload information onto a public server instantaneously. You could use this as a public and easily assessable CV. Files can be uploaded straight onto the Internet. You can format colours, size and fonts in word and thenupload without the hassle of coding these in.
Some negatives and risk associated with FTP are; Bounce Attacks, Spoof Attacks, Brute Force Attacks, Sniffing, Username Protection, & Port Stealing. These problems can be minimized by employing encryption tools.
Other information i learnt in class today is that anything you out on your Athene account is going to be publicly assessable too the whole world and that we get 20mg worth of space and that the links are case sensitive. I feel educated on Athene and FTP now and am ready to start creating.

Cascading Style Sheets

Advantages in CSS are designed to enable separation of document content and document presentation.

This improves accessibility, flexibility and control in presentation. It reduces complexity and repetition and allows multiple pages to share formatting.

Using templates you can change the entire webpage layout, staying within the limits of what the template can handle of course. It allows you to change the colours, font, size and background.

There certain options in templates that you cannot change. If the template your offering doesn’t offer it then you can’t change it. For example, some texts, fonts and colours are unavailable.

Accessibility is worth considering because having your webpage easily accessible ensures that more people can navigate it and hence more people will view and use it.

Link to your post as a comment to this post, about what you have customised on your Blog using Template changes and/or CSS HTML changes.

What I Learnt In MPI104...

For the last term I have been attending MPI104  classes as part of my animation degree at CSU  Wagga. We have touched base on a lot of different and interesting things that the web has to offer.

We started off with Google  . Google is a globally recognised search engine, but has so much more than that to offer, it has Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Docs, and more. I am only assuming that I am not the only person with the mentality of "I'll just Google it".

Then we started Blogs, this is mine. I have 6 posts so far (including this one). If you would like to view some of my more interesting posts I suggest you click here and here  . Changing the aesthetics of my blog was entertaining. I changed my template to one where I could choose my own picture background. I changed a few of the text colours and fonts to make it more interesting and also bolded and italic’s a few words and added background colour. I have added a number of gadgets including a poll, a slideshow, event, profile and picture, a Wic Wac Woe game, mouse chasing fish, a recent comments section, flickr photo section and an option to rate your reaction to my post. There are so many gadgets and many more that will be trying out as I go. I have also added a content warning page that pops up before you are allowed to enter my blog. I have made a few comments to other class members blogs and they can be found; here , here and of course, here . Some interesting comments that I have found are located here and here .

My favourite of the things we have been introduced to would have to be Flickr . I think it is fantastic. Playing around with your images in picnik, geotagging, interestingness, and sets. Its all one very organised photo storer and sharer. I have uploaded 40 items, joined 3 groups and have found some favourite images. Some of which are found here , here and here .

Del.icio.us ! I love the idea of it, what a neat invention. The fact that I can save my favourite websites and access them anywhere is awesome! I have actually found myself using this site a little when I need to remember a website but haven’t got a pen handy. I have 60 bookmarked pages! I think i have bookmarked every class members blog, my Flickr and Delicious account, a few favourtie webpages including jokes page because I am interested in jokes and LOLing. Some pages I have bookmarked are here , here  and finally, here .

I believe that’s about it for me on our first half of MPI. I am pleased to say that I have benefited from this subject and cannot wait till continue on with our webpage designing. Becky Gibson.

Favourites.

Here are some of the sites i most visit when using the internet.

Facebook

Hotmail

Google

Wikipedia

YouTube

FML

Tagging Sites.

There are many tagging sites on the wide web. Some of them which i have found are;

Stumble Upon

Digg

Blinklist

These are handy little sites for making browsing and using the web easier.

Delicious - Week 5 Posting

hiii all. I rather like del.icio.us . I didn't at first as thought it seemed rather pointless, but after exploring through it a little more, i started to discover the joys of the Lish.
It is good because, if you've found an awesome website for an assignment or just life in general and you forget the URL then you can jump onto DeLish and there it is, anywhere, anytime!
Also, because of the ‘folksonomy’, you can find out which sites are popular in many different categories, therefore, finding the best info, and stuff out there in the wide world of web with very little hassle.

Have a look at my account and the pages i've tagged :]

Flickr - week 4 posting.

I think Flickr is fantastic. I am already very fond of it. It is easy to navigate, your photos are easy to upload and to organise in sets. You can browse other people’s photos with ease and check out the most latest and popular photos and make a comment on ANYONES photos. I think the group system they have going is very useful. You are able to see photos of things you are interested in without the hassle of searching and filtering though others. *Check out the stick figures in peril - funny group.*
Also, something that i haven't seen before is the geo-tagging. How good is that? So if you really like the look of something, you can see where in the world it was taken. And you can organize your own photos to where in the world they were taken.

I really do think that Flickr is great, kind of like a less personal Facebook. As you are only sharing photos, not what you are doing every second of every day!

Check my Flickr page. Happy browsing :]

Heres a image I have uploaded on Flickr

week 3 posting

helllo!

this is my blog for MPI104 2010, welcome, :D

enjoy looking around, check out my old blog if you want.

the difference between a post and a blog is simple. A blog is your actual page, like the whole thing and a post is the individual things you upload, like text, images, audio, video and more.
So many people use blogs for so many different reasons; 'usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video'.

See-ya!