Week 12 Tutorial

This week Nathan taught us about mashups and APIs and showed us a few examples. Its a smart idea how these sites work, how you don’t actually have to go to flickr (or a site like it) to access the data and pictures. The Wolfenflickr site was pretty clever I thought and a good way to show how you can access the data without accessing the site. The Retrivr site is amazing, how the program can pick up photos by the resemblance to the drawing and colours is remarkable. With these new websites coming out, it opens a whole new option for viewing content which could be very important in the near future.

Week 11 Tutorial

This week Nathan explained to us what a data visualisation is. Basically it is a set of data in picture form (pie graph, any kind of graph or image representing numbers). This helped me as I did not know what one was before today so it makes the second assignment decision easier. He showed us examples of some sites which were pretty amazing and a bit sad really (especially that one with the annual report on himself -> does he really expect people to take an interest in what he does how many times?). The We Feel Fine and the Gapminder, on the other hand were pretty cool and quite interesting to look at…I wonder how much effort went into those 2 sites. At this stage I might do the data visualisation assignment…

Week 10 Tutorial

This week Nathan taught us the basics of HTML and CSS. I found it really good because I want to build websites for my career. I already knew the HTML stuff but to learn the CSS was a bonus and now I think I understand how it works. CSS is a bit different from HTML and it takes a bit of getting used to with all the { and } and : and ; codes. I never knew that CSS could get that complex, I did a bit of extra research about it and there’s so much stuff you can do with that. I didn’t know that CSS could completely design a website but I spose you learn something new everyday. I will hopefully try to learn more about it in my spare time.

Week 5 Tutorial

First off this week Nathan showed us the creative commons distributing licenses. Basically what this is about is that these licenses are trying to find a balance between copyright and distribution; a “some rights reserved copyright” as they call it. There are four main licenses that they use:

• Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
• Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
• No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
• Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (http://creativecommons.org/about/license/)

He then showed us archive.org; a non-profit site which is a database that offers access to any content for researchers, historians or scholars in digital form. This involves texts, videos, audio and music.

Week 4 Tutorial

Cricinfo Australia

• loads quickly
• rss feeds easy to use
• all the information you could want on cricket in Australia: feature articles, player profiles, latest news, fixtures, stats etc
• each article has related links on the right -> (example domestic article) links are in relation to whats mentioned in the article: so any players/umpires/teams/tournaments that are mentioned in the article have a link to articles about that particular player/umpire/team/tournament…if that makes sense (and all the articles are like this). Its a good way to organise the site, much the same as tagging
• structure: latest news in in the middle of the page, latest photo on the left, navigation: horizontally at the top of the page with drop down; well orgainsed, advertising: sloppy, dont think it fits in with the site, home page looks like they’ve tried to jam in as much as possible

Week 3 Tutorial

This mornings tute was split up into two sections: advice about the first assessment piece and more about tagging, rss and design patterns.

Michael talked to us about the first assesment item and discussed the many possibilities we have at our hands. I think I am going to do the 3rd option which is a reference page or site about a current affairs topic. Michael said we could use options such as another blog or something different like a facebook page which could be challenging. At the moment I think I will do my assignment on whether or not the Australian cricket team should go to Pakistan for the ICC Champions Trophy but this could change in the future, although it will definetly be about a sport topic.

The second part of the tute was on tagging, design patterns and a bit more on rss. Michael explained that there are many ways to go about designing a website and that you have to take into account the companys needs and outcomes. He showed us a couple of examples of websites that he has built and this backs up his point in the lecture that there are many ways to go about designing content and patterns for a website.

The tagging and the rss feed readers mixed together. To finish the tute we signed up to readers and I chose the Google one (it looked simple and is easy to navigate and use) and subscribed to a few rss feeds of our choice. Michael explained the importance of tagging and there is a suprising depth I did not realise with tags (its very easy to gather and label information this way, helps out other people with similar interest, very easy to share with other people etc.)