Semester in Review

Wow that was one of the quickest terms I’ve had. It seems like it was last week we had a last assessment for MPI104 and I had to tick some little boxes to see if I had done everything required for assessment #1. Over the semester I have learnt a lot of handy tricks such as posting a link to websites. I believe these links gives the page some authenticity, as the readers are able to click on the key word and like magic there at a new page. In the olden days I would have just copied and pasted the web address, this was tacky. Therefore to sum up so far learning all about HTML have been fun and worthwhile and I’m sure there is more to learn about them.

So I will start on my blog. I have tried to update it as often as possible but I found this difficult as like many uni student these days, the end of a semester is extremely busy but I feel I am pleased with the quantity of blogs I have published. Okay so no I’ll get into the nitty gritty of my blog. Okay I have played with the template and style a bit. I was going to put a Sydney Swans background as my template but discovered the colour scheme would not be appropriate and make my blog difficult to read. I also decided I did not want pictures in the background as I was looking at other blogs in the class and felt that the blogs with picture detracted the words in a sense. Therefore I decided on a different approach to give my blog a fresh new look. I found a colour wheel and a page on colour schemes on the net. Very useful. Researching colour schemes I was able to get an understanding of the appropriate colours to use for my template. I had a green template and felt using dark purple, blue and a light blue on occasions was the correct colour scheme I was after. I was talking about the colour wheel for a reason because I was able to choose a specific colour and shade I was after to insert in my blog, as I felt the colour options that blogger offered were pretty standard, and simply I wanted more. To spice my blogs up I tried to insert pictures as often as possible to give readers a visual understanding of what I was writing about. Too much text can be boring. The blog I’m most happy with it Making my page look top. On some blogs I even went as far as placing a video on it so the readers are able to see in greater depth what I have writing about. The Departed.

Okay that’s enough about my blog, Flickr was one of my greatest challenges as I felt I didn’t have enough adequate picture to upload to my account. I found I had severe technical issues when uploading some of my images. Some photos were did not upload correctly, …… and a picture in picture effect was created. For some reason Flickr decided to import a smaller version of the image in the top left corner. I tried to fix this in many ways and spent hours on getting one full image uploaded, as I just wanted the image to look normal. I found this only occurred on specific photos. The photos I tried to import were originally from the internet and maybe there was a copyright over them, but they were only my friends my space photo and I know she didn’t copyright them. Anyway so I decided to keep the photos there to highlight my difficulties with uploading but others photos couldn’t even upload for apparently the format was incorrect even though I triple checked the format and it was all correct. What was going on? I tried to upload these images but my computer just wouldn’t accept them. I decided to try another computer, a better one and finally I was able to upload snapshots of aesthetically pleasing website. Was I relieved or what. I found that the technorati top 100 sites didn’t interest me and I felt that the ones I checked out weren’t aesthetically pleasing so I moved on to band webpag+es as I know they always have funky sites. For the assessment I was required to upload 30+ images and I decided to turn to my past and upload images of me when I was young. It was fun to do this as I was able to track down memory lane for a bit as I remember my first day of school, skiing, when I got my cats. I shared these photos with everyone so they too will be reminded of their past and hopefully have a little smile on their face ☺. Organising my flickr was pretty easy in the end I created 3 sets, swans game, family and friends and miscellaneous. These sets enabled me to navigate my way through my photos effectively as too the tags.

My Del.ici.ous was hard to get into, by that I mean I couldn’t really get excited about the site. Generally I use my little laptop and save all my bookmarks under safari. However saving bookmarks under Safari only enables me to access the bookmarks whereas Del.ici.ious allows me to share my bookmarks and discover new sites for myself. For example I found an awesome game for an equally as awesome television show, Robin Hood. Not only could I access new sites I would have never found I was also able to send sites to people so they could check the sites out that I found interesting. Really I should learn to appreciate Del.ici.ious more. Bundling my bookmarks makes finding relevant bookmarks much more easier, I don’t really want to go through pages and pages of bookmarks to find something that may interest me. This is why I love those bundles. The internet is all about making research accessible and Del.ici.ious follows through with this belief by the wonder of bundling and tags.

So now you know what happened this semester and what I have created online. I’ve had some good times and I will continue to uses these pages and skills well after MPI104 ceases in the coming weeks for me.