Website Development: Reflection

I'm fairly happy with my website in that it successfully brings together all of the work I have done throughout the course, and helps me to realise just how much content i have produced, as well as how much I have learnt. While there are still a lot of ways in which I could improve my website and opportunities to continue developing it, when I put it in the perspective of what I would have been able to create before doing this course (probably nothing) I'm fairly satisfied with what I have achieved.

There is, however, a lot of room for improvement. With more time and a bit more knowledge I probably would have liked to develop this from scratch using HTML, as I sometimes had trouble with the placement of text and images in Google Sites. While some of this could be fixed by editing the HTML it didn't always work, as I discovered when trying to put in the background (I discovered way too late that there was a way of doing this, but it would have been incredibly difficult to place images over the top where I wanted them). I would have also liked to make it a bit neater, a bit more interesting visually, and it would have been better if I had found ways to continue the desktop theme throughout. I did attempt to create some visuals in Illustrator to enhance the look of my site, but was unable to finish these due to time constraints.
I think that Google Sites did make it difficult in some ways to achieve the aesthetic that i wanted, as many things functions like including background colours and images were not made available when editing a page. I found these functions today when doing the finishing touches on my site, and I think that this is a flaw in Google Sites' design which should be resolved to make it more user friendly.
To further improve the site I would also try to develop my own images to accompany the links and information, so that there would not be any copyright concerns. I don't think that the website particularly constructs an online identity, but does work as a central place to store my work and give basic information about myself.

I didn't develop my Facebook page in the way that I planned, as I found it difficult to construct a purely professional identity through it. Instead I kept it quit plain, and just provided my work history and basic details. I don't think it really adds anything to my project, except fpr the few links in my profile HTML, as any information on it could be found on my Myspace and website, but it was useful throughout the course as a tool of communication and collaboration, as well as a medium through which I could develop my HTML skills.

I used my Myspace as an interactive outlet to show my favourite bands, films, television shows, and a couple of videos. I was going to post the same videos that are on my website as they were more relevant, but felt that there was no need to double up and the personalised nature of my Myspace meant that any videos I wanted to put on there were relevant to what I was trying to achieve.
In order to improve my Myspace, I would change the background image and text colour into a scheme that was clear and easy to read. As it is, it is possible to read everything on the page, but the background needs to be lined up with the text in the right places in order to do so. I would probably like to make my background an image that I had created as well.

Overall, i'm satisfied with what I have produced, but think it would benefit greatly from continued development and improvement

Week 12 Second Life Workbook Exercises

Part A.

1. Use the search Function to find a location that interests you. make a landmark there, and then return to your original location.













This is taken at the Summersville water park. I got really excited about it before logic took over and I realised I couldn't actually go on the slides myself. I did score some free bikinis though. I also went for a swim and got stuck under water for a really long time before I remembered my avatar could fly. Also at this point I was wearing at least two skirts.


2. Enter a public space in-world and strike up a conversation with someone (not from our class). See if you can add them as a friend and then send them an instant message. See how many friends you can make in the time alloted.













I had trouble making friends at first, because I kept going to places where there were no other people. I finally found some people to talk to in an Irish bar, but they didn't seem to interested in talking to me (I blame the fact that I was wearing a bikini at the time). I managed to find more friends later on, at a jazz club, and at Bipond's Pondi beach where I found some Australians.


3. Cmd-click on your avatar and select 'edit appearance'. Use the tools provided to alter the standard appearance. Also edit your clothes using the same function.

I edited my avatar's clothes so she had a purple skirt and yellow top, but later found a freebie shop and got a cool umbrella skirt and hot pink shoes (among other things). I also edited my avatar's actual appearance. You can't actually see it in my photos, unfortunately I managed to make her a bit ugly but at least she was different.

Part B.

Socialisation and Communication in Second Life...

Second life provides several modes of communication for its users, who can chat publicly, or message each other privately using the IM function. There are also options for voice chat, and 'postcards' can be emailed from second life to other users or non-users.

Second Life is well equiped for socialisation, as it offers a huge range of bars, clubs, and other social areas. These include the Summersville waterslide park, other theme parks, and the bowling park, which offers users the opportunity to bowl, play pool, and drink with friends.

I tried to find people to make friends with in this area, but unfortunatley there was nobody there, so I tried one of the dance clubs. People were partner dancing in this particular club and I thought it would be strange to start talking to anybody, but one of them struck up a conversation with me and added me as a friend.

This function helps socialisation in Second Life, as it helps users to continue to find each other within the program, and allows them to share the new discoveries they make in-world.

Week 12 E-learning post

"Think on some of the experience you had in-world and consider the reading by Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace". Contribute to the discussion about the social lives and communities that form in virtual worlds, and how they have their own standards and norms of acceptable behaviour. What do you think of the LambdaMOO community's decision to kill the character of Mr. Bungle?"


I found second life really interesting, particularly in that I started almost immediately to think of the virtual space as real. I did things like get excited about the water slide park, and felt really inapproproate turning up to a bar wearing a bikini.I think that when you enter a virtual world like second life, if you don't know the social conventions of that world you try to stick mostly to those in real life (I did anyway).I found the concept of LambdaMOO difficult to grasp, and because of this I can't help but think the people willing to put the time and effort into participating in it would be fairly emotionally invested with that world. Even if this isn't the case, the Mr Bungle character was being offensive both in world and in real life, and because of this some form of punishment was called for. A real life punishment would definately be over the top, but something was required to give those that cared a sense of justice.While you could argue 'killing' Mr Bungle was a bit pointless, as a new account was easily created, it served a purpose in that it made the LambdaMOO community happy (for the most part), and acted as a form of censorship against offensive behaviour.

Website Development

I decided that rather than starting from scratch I would go to Plan B in terms of my desktop visual idea. I'm still going to have the desktop, but I'm going to create the entire image, including icons in photoshop. This will mean that I can't make each of the icons be links like I wanted to, so the homepage will act more as a contents page than anything. I will try to link the image just to go to the links page, and then navigation can be centralised there. There is also a navigation bar so I will see what I can do with that as well.

Week 10 e-learning Mobile phone culture & regulation

Social dynamics have different effects in different mobile content cultures. As outlined in Goggin (2006), different cultures have developed their own ways in which they produce, distribute, and share mobile content. This centres on text messaging in many Asian countries, especially in Japan in which mobile phones are used to distribute novels in short chapters via sms- a fairly unique use of the service. Mobile phones encourage sharing as they combine cameras, and video and sound recording capabilities with the ability to instantly send any content produced via multimedia messages. This content should definitely be owned by the person that creates it. Although there may be copyright violations when uploading content to Youtube, I think it is a good thing as it offers another way to share content with a broader audience without the charges of sending it via sms.
Regulation
Politics
Culture
Philosophy
Usage
Social Dynamics

Website Development- Google sites

I started making some actual progress with my website, developing a desktop image to use on my home page, and some icons that I was going to use as links to the other pages, such as employment history, and my links page.
When I tried to put the image into my website, I realised I couldn't layer images. I thought that this wouldn't be a problem, as I would set the screen image as the background. For some reason I couldn't get Google sites to do this. I checked the HTML tutorial, and got it to work in there, then tried it in notepad and saved it as a HTML document and it worked there, but for some reason when I put the same code into my Google site it wouldn't save the code. It was very strange. I checked on the help pages but couldn't find anything useful in there. I'm now considering abandoning Google Sites and hosting my website through something else but I'm not sure if I will.
I also had some strange problems with colours, some of the icon images i had created in Adobe Illustrator changed colour completely when I uploaded them to the site. I thought that this was because I had created them in CMYK but when I converted them to RGB nothing changed. I resolved this by hosting the images on Photobucket instead of uploading them directly from my computer. Since this worked I'm a bit confused about what the problem actually was, but its fixed so I'm not going to question it too much.

Mobile phone content production Part 2

I finally got the pieces of our video onto the computer by sending them via bluetooth to my boyfriend's phone, then connecting his phone to the computer. Once on there, i discovered that the file type that the videos were (something like .3gp) couldn't be edited with windows movie maker. It was only a minor set back and i downloaded an unactivated version of AVS video converter (it was the first thing that came up on my google search). while it coverted the files successfully to avi format, it also insisted on leaving its watermark logo thing in the middle of the video, but it was only small so I decided not to worry about it. Unfortunately I then discovered the conversion caused the end of the sound to be cut off some of the videos. I tried converting the files to different formats but it did the same thing. I had no idea how to fix this so I just breathed a sigh of relief that I had kept both takes of the video and made a somewhat mashed up version of the song using 5 different clips of video. I got most of the song in there but had to cut a line that I lost from both clips. Its very dodgy but I'm still proud of our work.
Enjoy!