Project A - Week 7

Project A, One of the first questions that came to my mind before writing the first word of code was, what am I going to write about in my website? There are lots of possible subjects. The final idea came very fast; I am in Australia as an exchange student reason why I decided to focus in my biggest hobby "travelling".

I have been studying in México programming for two yea

rs, that could maybe explain why my website is using some tools we haven't seen yet in class, like JavaScript and some other features of HTML.

In my home university I used to make websites using HTML with tables and styles, now in Australia I learned is a big mistake, but I’m always open for new ways of coding, that's why I want to learn more CSS before I go back.

One of the main ideas for my website is that I wanted it to be easy for navigation, that's why the menu on the top can show the different sections on the site, it is divided in

eight pages and one index. The scroll was made in JavaScript, I prefer using JavaScript instead of flash for this kind of navigation options because I consider myself an old school programmer, everyday I see that programming is becoming less important that how it used to be before, and the reason is because the actual software is almost doing most of the coding part.

On the index part I decided to show a mashup that show

s a yahoo map with some of the pictures I have taken in different parts of the world, this mashup was made in yahoo pipes, it works extracting the pictures from the flickr server ID, all these photos are geo tagged, which makes easier for the mashup to identify the spots.

I have to say that I am new on this thing about mashups and APIS, but after a couple days trying over and over again, finally worked!

One of the things I didn’t found about mashups is how to give them format and style, when I inserted it on my website it looks like if it wasn’t part of it.

There is another section on the menu called America, which is a complete JavaScript animation that makes a square to move every time the user clicks on one of the options showed below. In this section I took a list of flags from Google and one picture from every country, so when the user clicks on the signal next to the flag the window hides and another window with the information of the country comes out, one of the effects of the window is that when it finishes moving it makes a slight rebound that gives a more natural effect.

In the other sections which are named as continents, and the subsections named as countries I decided to add some of the pictures I have taken during some of my trips, excepting Asia which is in the list the only section where the pictures where taken from other sources.

I decided to upload the project in the server of one website I was making before because I don’t trust very much on the free hosting websites, and if I have the chance of using a normal server, I will.

Finishing this project gave me a big satisfaction, because of all the hours I dedicated for making all the code and functions, and when I test the site and it was working correctly, trust me feels very good.

Alex.

Week 6 Carving Up The World

Another week, more things to learn.

This week we saw some stuff related to patterns (conventions), internet lacks and limitations, some concepts like ontology, taxonomy, hierarchy, folksonomy and categories.

When we are using the internet we never think about those thing called "conventions" that make our navigation easily, and the reason is very simple we don't pay enough attention.

When we visit almost any website clicking on the different sections and we want to go back home, we just click on the logo located on the top left.

Why is in the top left and not in the top right? Because of conventions, all of this "rules" have been established for making our experience on the internet easily.

But these rules don't mean that there is some "rules guy" writing how thing must be working, is because with the time people has been adapting their costumes when navigating to the easiest way possible.

We can also remember some of the concepts given in class, Ontology: "The study of that which is", Taxonomy:"Dividing up the world into chunks", Hierarchy:"Normally implying hierarchies", Categories:"As thing that are placed into categories", Folksonomy:"Another approach compared with taxonomy".

We also learned how to identify the different components on a "Machine Tag", like the namespace:predicate=value; the value can be repeated in different machine tags because the differences can be identified with the predicate or the namespace.

"Ontology is Overrated"

Cheers, Alex.

No Lecture- Reflection Week

During this week I had chance to analize some of the topics we have been studying in this unit, was an important break for me because of all the content we have been learning.

We also had to read a couple of websites with topics related to the media production.

The first (http://blue-anvil.com/archives/guide-to-semantic-mark-up/) is a guide to semantic Mark-up, which is basically a short guide that explains the correct way of spelling the HTML code, in this guide I found very interesting examples of the possible mistakes that we can make when writing the code.

One of the best examples I found is that when I want to render the text in bold I always use and here they

explain that the correct way of rendering bold letters is , I also have to say that some of the other examples I already know them like the css uppercase modification and the title modification.

The blockquote example was also new for me because before knowing this spell, i used to make a table with a copuple of columns, writing the blockquote on the right column and giving styles with css, I have to say that is awsome to learn some different ways of writing code.

The second website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia)

contains some of the steps that the government have been taking during these years with censoring some websites.

In the text they explain that the first reason why they wanted to censor some of the internet content is because few children where having access to pornographic content, but this was just the first reason, during the next years they began to add new modifications

on the censoring law, dividing the categories in two:

Mandatory censored websites and Optional censored websites.

On the mandatory censored websites are all the children pornographic websites, and some other random illegal websites, and on the Optional censored websites are some of the 18+ content.

In my opinion the government should be worried of some other stuff, instead of trying to be like the "father" of a society in which residents should have the rights to decide which content they want to have online.

I can say that this kind of online censoring laws the only thing that they are creating is to make Australia similar to these Asian "no freedom" countries.

Cheers.

Mashups and Apis

Uff, after this lecture everything I thought I leaned about web is now just confusion.

Mashups, programming, apis (application programming interface), oh my good no more code please!!

One of the things that I'm learning during this time in Australia is how different could be the way of making websites around the world, this study abroad semester is one of the best opportunities to explore and learn about how the things specifically websites are made here.

For example, in Mexico we also use css and html, but the css styles we use are just to give format to all the texts inside the website, because for design purposes we use the html making tables and trying to make it look as better as possible.

Something that I've found here is that css is more than text format, with the css you can modify completely the design of a website. One of my principal objectives on this semester is learn as much as possible about css, so that when I return to Mexico I wil

l teach my mates the benefits of using css on web design.

About mashups the only thing i've learned already is that you can make awesome stuff just knowing how to apply it. The demo websites that the lecturer showed us are incredibly nice, they show a new interactive way of making websites.

I hope during the next weeks I will learn more about this Mashups and Apis to use them on future websites to design.

Cheers.