Summer Holidays

So I finally finished the semester, which is a great relief! I just found out that I got an HD on a scientific report, and I'm super-chuffed about that. I feel like I'm finally improving at writing reports. Now I have four months off Uni, and I need to find stuff to keep me entertained. I'm going to keep playing around on Trove, and I'm also going to learn JavaScript. Codeacademy, who I have talked about before and love, has a whole bunch of different courses that you can take online, all of them free. It's really good for someone like me who has never done anything like coding before, because it is simple, easily understood, and also updates in real time so you can see exactly what you have done.

After I've done that, I'm going to help a friend build an online store. She wants to sell all the vintage clothes that she has collected, and her brother-in-law was supposed to make her an online store, but I've known her for a couple of years now and he hasn't done it in all that time. So I'm going to do it for her. It shouldn't take too long, hopefully, and it will spur her on to get organised.

Other things - I'm going to take up running. I've never done it before, and I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to read a book called Sleepwalkers, about the first world war. I'll give my house a really, really good clean, which is boring but needs to be done.

Here are two digital information interesting things that I found this week: an article on The Atlantic, by Walter Kirn. If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy is about how pervasive digital technology has become, and how it's listening to us, and it totally feeds into my own concerns about information and privacy. Also, Internet Live Stats shows you in real time how many web sites there are, how many emails were sent today, as well as instagram, google searches, and other internet related items. It's pretty amazing to see the numbers tick over so rapidly.

Maria's Sweet Treats

In class for the last couple of weeks, we have been putting what we have learnt about HTML into practice, to create our own websites. We had to make our own website, for a company called Maria's Sweet Treats, a cake store that supplies mini desserts for parties and other events. It was interesting, but very hard to do. HTML is very rule-oriented, and very fiddly, and if you don't close one of your brackets, you're totally screwed. It's very time consuming and detailed.

Huan got us to download Kompozer, which is a free application that helps you write your own code. While it was great when we were making tables and headers, when I started trying to do more complicated coding, often it would not recognise it or just disappear the code that I'd typed in. I attempted to use background images within a table with text over the top (impressive, I know), but Kompozer would not let me resize the background images to fill the cells. I tried and I tried, and sweated over it for a couple of days, until I just had to let it go and move on with my life. I think that if I was going to do coding on a regular basis, I would probably purchase a more sophisticated application, like UltraEdit or Sublime Text. They're not terribly expensive, Sublime Text is $70, but I don't really need it.

Anyway, here is my website: Maria's Sweet Treats. Check out that sweet fixed position navigation bar! That one took me ages. Hopefully it's all working: when I first loaded it onto the server I realised that I'd saved my images onto my computer and then used a link for the image from there, but I needed to use the image link instead. So I fixed it, loaded it again, took another look. Then I needed to fix a link. So I fixed it, loaded it, looked again. Designing a website is incredibly time consuming and really detailed. One of the customers at the cafe that I work at was telling me that he's recently hired a company to build him a website, and it's going to cost him over four thousand dollars. Originally I thought that this amount was ridiculous! However, after going through the stress of trying to get this website to work, I've changed my mind, and decided that they totally deserve that money.

Update: I don't know why the home button on the home page isn't working. It works just fine on my mobile's browser. I suppose it's kind of redundant anyway, it only refreshes the page, but it's annoying that it doesn't work. I think I'm just going to have to accept that it doesn't work, and leave it alone, and move on to other homework. Like figuring out how the cloud works.

Reflections

I have found this assignment to be a real challenge, but a challenge that I have enjoyed. Having only a small amount of familiarity with a lot of the subjects addressed within the first five weeks, I was easily daunted by the ideas and technologies that we were going to use. However, as we tackled them one by one, I found that they were interesting and enjoyable. I think a great advantage was working within a group, where we were able to support and assist each other as we progressed.

I never thought that I would enjoy HTML as much as I have been! I've never used HTML before, and was scared by the very thought of it! I think that when you see it, without knowing that there is a strict procedure and rules that you can follow, that the very sight of it is confusing. But now, after using it a bit, I'm able to understand it and use it. I'm still progressing through Codeacademy, onto CSS now, which is a bit harder I think but still, easy to understand so long as you follow the rules. This is probably the biggest thing that I'm going to take away from this subject - that I can use HTML, and that I'm actually quite good at it. I think it's the logic of the coding - it appeals to my preference for order.

Other things that I learned through this course

• How to embed a map
• How to use Twitter, why we should use Twitter, and how to embed a tweet (I was very proud of that one, it was my first attempt at HTML, and I was practically giddy with delight when it worked)
• What a document is. I'm still quite interested in that, but I really think that Suzanne Briet's claims about the leopard being the document is the position that I agree with.
• How to use Endnote. This tool is great, and one that I will definitely be using in future studies.
• This one is really just to point out that look, I just made an unordered list using HTML and isn't that amazing?

The biggest thing that I will take away from this assignment, however, is awareness. Previously, I had all of my social networking sites open to the public, all of my information freely available, and I was using only a couple of passwords, often for more than one website. Now I have a lot of different passwords, all complicated and different, as well as changing the settings for privacy for a lot of sites. I think that privacy is going to be a huge issue in the coming years. And it is something that I feel slightly more ready for after this course. 

Twitter

Now that I've been using Twitter for a couple of weeks, I'm ready to concede that it does have some good points. I follow ABC news, and I've found that it's a good source for news and other information. I don't have a television, or really listen to the radio, so unless I read a newspaper or go online I can often miss important things. So that's one good thing.

I'm also following Marshall Breeding, who's a bit of a big-time guy in the world of Digital Information Management. I actually discovered him for Information Discovery, but some of the articles that he posts onto his Twitter account are quite relevant to this course. He also has a website which is full of interesting information. Judy O'Connell, who I've mentioned on here before, is also on Twitter, and she posts some good links for Information Management.

My favourite Twitter account, however, is louis as art. I'm not at all a One Direction fan, and I'm not even sure if it's pronounced the French way or not, but some industrial person has taken the time to find artworks that are evocative of photographs of Louis from One Direction. And some of them are brilliant. Here's a few examples:

sunrise // chris hobel pic.twitter.com/g4Kjv4AMBB
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 19, 2015

(one more first day of spring post) abstract knives // unknown pic.twitter.com/ZkjFlugYKL
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 20, 2015

pink shadows // ellen ys - #KCA #Vote1DUК pic.twitter.com/0qxaCAwTnu
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 28, 2015

I also just taught myself how to embed tweets! Took me a little while, but after last weeks class in HTML, I didn't panic, I followed the instructions, and did it myself! It really is amazing what I'm learning here.

HTML and my poor confused brain

This week was an introduction to HTML, and I've found it to be quite difficult so far. I think my computer has been the problem, it just refused to recognise the link that I attached to the page.



Here's a screenshot of my (Mac) TextEdit attempt:













And this is my (Windows) Notepad version:










Exactly the same text, exactly the same link, exactly the same! However, when I tried to open the link from TextEdit, my computer would tell me that the URL could not be found. Multiple attempts later, there was no change. So I copied and pasted a link that Huan gave me, and that worked, but there was no reason for it to. I still wanted to be able to do it myself, so I used myDesktop, opened a Windows application, and went through the process again, with the right result this time. There has to be something wrong with TextEdit, because I didn't do anything differently, just used a different application. So from now on I'll be using Windows for any HTMLing that I do in class.

Other than this frustration, I think I'll be okay at HTML. It seems to be reasonably straightforward, and has a lot of rules, so as long as I follow them I should be okay. I can always give myself a break and edit a Trove page when I get too annoyed with it.

So welcome to my blog! This is a first for me, so it's probably going to change quite a bit as I get better at using eblogger.

About me - my name is Nerida, I'm in first semester of MIM, and I currently work as a barista in a cafe. It's a good place to work, and I do enjoy it, but it doesn't tax my brain. I'm ready to do something different, and I think that I would enjoy library work. Something that doesn't cover my clothes and shoes in coffee would be good as well.

My dad is a librarian, currently working as the head librarian at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea. When I was growing up though, he was the chief medical librarian at Bendigo Base Hospital. So on my days off from school, or when I managed to persuade him that I was way too sick to go to school (I was a terrible liar, and did this a lot), I would go with him to his work, and spend my day shelving books, wandering around, and looking at disgusting diseases in medical books. So for me, libraries are fun places!

I'm not very technologically able when it comes to the internet; I can do very basic things, but I'm hoping to learn more, and to become more skilled than I am. I really skim the surface of Web 2.0, so I think that some of what I'm hoping to achieve through this course is the ability to use the internet more adeptly, and to develop my skill set when it comes to social media and interaction. Understanding how html works is also going to be interesting, I'm quite looking forward to the course, but at the same time I'm a bit nervous because I obviously have a lot to learn.