Final MPI104-2007 Post

Well again it is that dreaded assessment time when sleepless nights are spent on work you will never care about again. Well in the case of this class I don't think that is the case I may even be a little sad (not as bad as that kid). What I have learnt and experienced about having 'an online presence' has been not just educational and interesting but a look into how technology can become a vital part of work and the social scene. Blogger lets me express myself to the world and del.icio.us and flickr let me share links and images with the world and those I have come into contact with both in the real world and virtual one.

Blogger
Well how has my work on Blogger, flickr and del.icio.us met the interestingness and aesthetics criteria, the balance between form, content and function. Well firstly it would be fair to say that the form of my blog has been changed from what it was. I got into the template and made the site background a tiled industrial/technological metal while changed the background where there was text to a more neutral dark grey to allow legible text. I also changed the header along a similar theme. I added boarders to the text sections to help 'pop' them out from the background. I have slightly adjusted the font colour and sizes to match this new look. My post on Web Aesthetics and the links on it helped me work out what my site needed. Images and links I found are very important as well. A site needs these to help the viewer find more info or understand a point. All my images I think help to get my posts message across like this one and this one. I have also adjusted my sidebar to an order which I think provides the most useful information and links first then moving down to the less important stuff. I have also tried to space my text out increasing legibility.

So I think I have experimented with the form, content and functionality of my blog and heave learn much from it.

Flickr
Flickr is an interesting thing to me because although I work in television I have never really been one to care much about photos. However because of flickr's design and function I have found it interesting. I can belong to groups with images I am interested in like this one and this one. Flickr has very limited layout options but I have selected a layout I like. It would be nice to have access to the premium layouts that cost money as well. I have found tagging very help full and sets also great like this one with proddies. Being able to aggregate favourites and sending others images is a very cool function that I should take more advantage of. I have used flicker to store images for my blog as well like the background.

Being able to clip images from sites on the web was great in order to evaluate them and I can see the use of flickr in a professional environment for similar purposes.

del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is an interesting service that I am still only beginning to get a handle on. My initial impressions were that it just duplicated the bookmarks of a browser but as the semester has progressed I have seen ifs full power and use. I have since been forwarding links that others may find helpful or interesting, using bundles to organise links and subscriptions to tags.

my del.icio.us

In Closing...
Commenting has also been a fun thing to do on blogger and flickr, it is something which I really have to get into more. Although this subject is almost finished I think I will try keep at it with my web presence. Not that I think anybody cares or reads but because it is a way I can express myself.


So from me in the chopper, have a good one!

Experimenting with 'The Look'

Well I have in the past experimented with the look of my website with varying degrees of success. You see I know what I like in a web page but do not necessarily have the ability to pull it off. In the past if I needed any web design done I would get someone who already knew how to do it. So when it came to getting into the guts of this blogs design I decided to get into its guts.

To the left is what my blog originally looked like. Very plain and a little too dark. As you can see by the current design of my blog I have gotten into its guts. I have applied a global tiles background but because the text became hard to read I modded the template to have a solid background for the blog entries and side bar. I also widened the blog to better accommodate larger screen sizes. I also chages the colours and added boarders to the sidebar and blog entries to 'pop' them out. I changes the font of the articles subtly and the header to match my blog.

I had to get into the padding and margin html to achieve the end result and now understand html and how it functions a lot better.

Check what some other people have done to mod their blogs;
drewpov
Crazy Comets
The Monkey House

More on Web Aesthetics

Aesthetics on the web is an interesting thing. I believe it is more about relationships than about beauty or how pleasing to the eye something is. Let me explain. The internet is functional so it needs to be practical to use, it is limited by technology so it needs to conform to standards, it needs to contain content or it is pointless and all this needs to be legible to people can see it easily. Aesthetics on the internet is the relationship between these factors.

Form + Content + Function = Aesthetically Good

All factors must be present and they must all also compliment each other and that is what makes good web aesthetics in my opinion.

Good Web Design Ideas
What Makes a Bad Website

Visit Spying?

So I know that you can monitor the visitors to a blog for all kinds of things. Here are a few graphs of my blogs stats. I have now noticed some limits to statcounter.com. Firstly it does not keep on record all visits only the last 30 visitors are recalled for detailed analysis and even for total site visitor it will not generate graphs longer than a few months long. I wish I had of known this earlier as I would have not used this service and looked for a less limited one.

Flickr allows to a certain degree for each account holder to see who has been visiting their images. Flickr allows users to see how many times images have been viewed and can also see any comments that have been written about them.

The Blog Watcher

It is useful to collect information about visitors to your blog because you can know if other people are reading what you are blogging and what they are reading. Blog writers like to know how many people visit each day, are they repeat visitors, how much do they read, where they come from and where they came to your blog from. Also getting an idea of the other blogs they frequent enables a blogger to understand what their readers are into.

I have had a counter on my blog for a few months. I use Statcounter.com because it was one of the first on the google search found and offers lots of feedback about visitors in an easy to understand way. I have had almost 300 hits on my blog in the time I have been using it. I think they mainly come from my MPI104 class at university which is why I created this blog however some have come from Technorati. I also found out that some come from France, China and Italy. Most stayed for less than five minutes and most only looked at my front page, so I should make the links to past posts more accessible.