Celebration! My Meta Data Works!

My website comes up when I google search my name! Yay!

Culmination of Tech Class

After consulting with the "road map" and presentation requirements I would just like to organize what I have done this semester.

1. Blog - this is my course blog. I have tried to be inspirational and reflective. In addition to blogging about assignments, I have extended it to include articles about technology in the NY Times or Yahoo. I enjoy reading news headlines and articles with my morning coffee, so I just took it a step further by blogging a synopsis and attaching a link in case anyone else was interesed.

Additionally, I created a commercial blog, an mp3 blog, and a newsfeed blog. The commercial blog hasn't really gone anywhere because I haven't put the time into really developing it yet, but it did give me the chance to sign up for google adsense and figure out where to paste it in the blogger template. My mp3 blog was for the purpose of adding my own mp3s to my classical music digest blog. The mp3 blog is special because I edited the html to embed the sound clips. The feed digest blog I will discuss later.

2. Flash Creations - I created two animations, start/stop buttons, and a movie. Additionally, I experimented with the action script examples that Chianan sent us, but did not save or publish them.

3. RSS Feed Digest - I wanted to create an mp3 digest out of syndicated podcasts and mp3 blogs, so I first created my own mp3 blog. Then I created a feed digest blog, created a feed digest, added the urls of podcasts/mp3 blogs, and edited the keywords so that items more specific to classical music and flute would appear.

4. Dreamweaver - this has been my main program for web design. It is relatively simple to use, yet I had trouble with the very beginning steps (like the opening menu....which is really confusing!) so I bought a book which helped me get over my minor "new computer program that I don't know anything about" fear. I can't say that the book taught me all that much (since the program is so straightforeward) but it did help me with the important steps of creating folders and always saving files to those specific folders. In addition, I have used Photoshop a great deal with creating and importing images, and taken advantage of the "import flash" method, since I used flash animations on my website.

5. I have not really experimented with wikis (although, I have definitely looked up things on wikipedia before!). I did create a swicki and place it on my commerical blog. Again, quite simple to do, the only moderately challenging part was placing it in the right place of the blogger template. However, I'm getting pretty good at editing the template and putting things where I want them to go on the first attempt these days. I have not created anything on Moodle, however, last semester my flute teacher Keith Underwood had a student who created a flute website for Keith's students using Moodle. The idea of it was really good because flute pictures, mp3, movies, or whatever could be shared. However, groups like these need active participation to be successful, and the members became somewhat disinterested after a month or two.

6. Domain and server - I am using Startlogic because, when I did a google search on web hosts, Startlogic was in the top 10 on more than one ranking chart. Another motivating factor was that Startlogic advertised 1 year and a free domain for a flat rate of $50. That was the cheapest one I saw, particularly since I plan to use my ElaineOlschesky.com website after this class. And the nice thing is - I don't have to worry about paying for it again until January. I don't remember the particulars about the web server perks, just that it gives me more memory than I would ever need and it promises a fast upload time.

7. Web design, etc. - That is all discussed in the post below.

This sums up everything I have learned this semester. I feel like I have accomplished a lot by developing a website with my own domain name. We touched on a lot of ideas in class, and even though I didn't use all of them for my website, perhaps I will in the future. Speaking about the future, I definitely plan to expand my knowledge further when I have the time. I would love to become more fluent in Flash language and once day rebuild my website completely using Flash. For now though, my website is pretty cool and definitely effective for advertising purposes. Thank you Dr. Gilbert and Chianan for teaching this class and giving me the opportunity to enhance my technological abilities!

New and Improved Website

Earlier this week I spent about 3 days revamping my website. It needed it - the first idea I had wasn't going anywhere and it was kinda lame. It, however, did give me a chance to learn how to use Dreamweaver. I'm also really glad we at least touched on a couple different website formats in class because it helped me to become more aware of options available in Dreamweaver.

I chose to use a table in both versions of my website because I really like the format of websites in which all the pages are the same template through the use of tables or CSS. Like I explained in class, the table doesn't start on the top of the page because I wanted the fun music background to show up, and my table is 600 pixels wide because it's a good size on the screen.

I seriously think the best part of my website is the picture of my flute. I cannot believe how well that turned out! I think that it was a combination of a lot of things. First, i put my flute on a white background, and that led to the sparkly, clear picture. I also put it on a black background.... but for whatever reason the pictures keep ending up really blurry. I'm not sure if the backgound or the amount of light in the room was to blame. I took the pic with no flash, and I think that my apartment was on the dark side when I took the pic with the white background. Too much light on an already shiny flute surely would cause blurriness, so maybe that's why the black background didn't work.

I had originally planned to have a flash movie somewhere on my page, but I thought that a scrolling gif animation would be perfect. I'm not anti-flash, I just haven't had a chance to fully immerse myself in it yet and feel more comfortable making a text animation than a text movie.

The buttons I love as well. I made them (and their mouse overs) all in Photoshop. It was really time consuming, but I like them a lot.

The only other real challenge was creating the template for the pages, but the nice thing was that once I created one I could just delete the info, write something different for a different site and "save as". The content is no different than in the first version of my website, so I didn't really have to think about what I was writing this time.

So, all in all, I'm really proud of my website. I think it's a great reflexion of my personality and what I want to present to the world.

Issues with MySpace

I can honestly say that I don't know much about MySpace - Online friend networking things aren't really an interest for me. Technically I am a member on facebook and friendster, but that's only because on both occasions I wanted to look at pictures on someone's specific site. I know that's it's addictive for some people though. My little sister (who is a college freshman) is absolutely obsessed with Facebook.

Although these sites are not an interest for me (I'd rather call someone up, send them an individual email, or work on improving my own website) I can see the benefits for advertising purposes. I actually went to a concert a couple weeks ago with a friend who learned about the particular band's performance date on their MySpace site. Many musicians use it as their personal website instead of developing one with their domain name, and it kind of makes sense. MySpace is considered "cool" and it allows you to upload sound clips - it's perfect!

However, in their naiveness, many people don't realize that everything they (and their guests) write in their MySpace account comes up in google searches. Actually, so does everything that we write on blogger. Clearly, this is not an issue for us, because, as an educational blog, we WANT our journal entries to extend as far as possible. However, we just need to know that nothing on the internet is completely private. Therefore, personal blogs, which, among young people, ends up being mostly gossip about classes, teachers, and other people, are actually open for the world to read. Therefore, people may want to exercise caution when writing blogs to make sure that all material is appropriate for presentation to the world.

Swicki mania!

I created a swicki and placed it on my commercial blog, Music Accessories that Rock!

The entire concept Swickis is still quite new to me, but a specially designed search engine is a great idea. It can lead you to the exact sources that you want to look at sooner than a google search can. Actually, it would be awesome is if there were a swicki directory so that people could use other people's swikis on particular topics. In fact, something like swicki could lead to the downfall of google or yahoo as the big search engines. There could be something like www.swicki.com, which would act like a regular search engine, then the results would be links to swickis on that topic. Then you'd get the direct search results you wanted. However, the downside to that is the "extra step" or doing a search to find the swiki before getting results. People might lack the patience to do the extra step.

Regardless, creating and using a swicki is quite simple and it may be the search engine of the future!