the new look.

well. im kinda bored now as the last week or two i have been doing my animation assignment which did not go to well might i add thus i now have all this free time so i decided to create a new look for my blog. it took a while cause i needed to delete a few codes from the html codes for the blogger backgrounds and add a few in that i created.


but i think it looks better as its different and you can read the text which is also a bonus!
i didnt include a title as it just looked wrong with the image that i put there!

at first i had a black background which is below in the screenshot but decided it was too dark for my likeing so i changed it to white!



so untill i get bored again it will stay the same.

2007 mpi104 : week 11 : keeping track of visitors

It is useful to know how many visitors you have as you can determine whether your content is actually good and if people read it. Previously I have used a counter from a different website which only allowed me to see how many people had visited my page. This is very different to the one that I now have which is from site meter.

Site meter allows me to see many things such as:

- how many people have visited my blog
- what time frame people visited
- how they came to my blog
- how they left my blog

So I have just joined site meter so I don’t have that many blog hits as I had to restart mine but I did get up to around two hundred which I think is a solid effort as my blog isn’t that interesting at all.

mpi104 : week 10 : technorati

im still trying to make sense of technorati and i think im getting there but here is what i understand so far. Technorati is an internet search engine focused on the world of weblogs. it organises and processes blogs, photos, videos and many more. it allows people to get whats happening on the internet and the world right now.

i think that technorati is different but yet also the same as google. as it is both a search engine showing things that are the most popular pages but technorati searches through tags that people have put on their blogs. this doesnt really make that much sense at the moment but hopefully someone can shed some light to technorati in the next few lessons as im sure we will be talking about it or rather people will be very competitive about their rank and authority.

when someone says rank i think of high school or really any group which has some sort of hierarchy thus i find it really petty that a website's main purpose is showing how someone is 'ranked' in the world. authority is also similar as its defined as a power or right delegated or given. i believe everyone is equal and yes there are people in the world that have more authority and it can not be determined through technorati.

my rank: 641,369
my authority: 8

from what i can gather the smaller your rank the higher you are in the ranking system that technorati uses. the authority is how many people have saved your blog. over the next week or so i will keep checking my numbers.



technorati’s 100 most popular blogs.

my fav. blog at the moment is seths blog as it has a good balance between form and content. the information is very informative and would be useful if you are into that sort of stuff. but i like reading random things and i do find it interesting.



there are more snapshots of blogs that i find aesthetically pleasing at my flickr account.

AESTHETICS.

from what i can understand about aesthetics is that it deals with many different ideas and notions of the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic and so it goes on. i also believe it has something to do with your emoptions in terms of your own sense of beauty and what you personally find visually attractive.

there are many sites that i find visually pleasing for many reasons which deal with text, layout, colours etc. for me i like the text to be big enough so i dont have to strain my eyes and in a colour that is easy to read when it is against a different coloured back ground. i personally like clean websites that arnt crowded (my blog spot is an excellent example of how i dont like it). so web sites that i do like include:

Eolo Perfido as it is very simple and easy to use. the text is easy to read and in white which stands out from the two toned dark grey/green background. the website is easy to navigate which is a bonus as things i dont get i have nothing to do with them. Eolo Perfido's work is also visually pleasing which also helps with the overall aesthetic of the website.

YU. is also another example of something that i find visually pleasing as it is simple but also has its own style. the white background is clean and the use of the grey text works well with the overall theme of the website. the use of the circle which works with the cursor that goes over a picture also makes the website more interesting.

everyone strives for a visually pleasing website but there are many out there that people just hate and there are people that show these ugly websites to others just to get a laugh. there are many reasons why one might think that a website is ugly, for me personally it is rank colours and bland backgrounds for example:

i find the austin homepage a really terrible website as i think some of the text is lost within the background. and i just dont like the colour green properly as fluoro green was a school colour and it brings up memories.


when i created my blogspot i wanted people to remember it and that is what i have done as every week joe refers to how large my title font is....and says im 'self indulged' or something like that. to be honest with you i couldn’t care less what he said about it but i know he has looked at it and remembers which was my main purpose.

rss feeds.

a link roll and rss feed is basically the same thing when it comes down to it. you can find the rss feed in the right hand corner of some websites url's.


WHAT IS XML.

in simple terms an XML is a general/ mark up language in which it shares data across different information systems, in this case the internet. a mark up language is a system which identifies complex structres in a document.

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WHAT IS RSS AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

RSS stand for many things such as
- Really Simple Syndication
- Rich Site Summary
- RDF Site Summary

an rss feed basically shows when a website has been updated. a prime example where you can find an rss feed are blogs, news sites, del.icio.us sites and photo sites. the RSS feed provieds a table of contents for the paticular site but not the information itself just rather links to the updated information. RSS feeds can be useful for those who know how to use it as it assembles information into an easier place to read.


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i have now included an rss feed on my blog for my del.icio.us account. this will enable you to quickly check if i have recently updated my del.icio.us account with any other interesting websites that i think you should check out.

del.icio.us

well this week we had to create a del.icio.us account. del.icio.us will allow us to save and share websites that we find interesting or lame! at the moment i dpnt really know of any interesting websites as i havent as yet just 'surfed' the web for no reason but now i shall!!!

if you wish to see the sites that i find interesting or lame click here

hopefully you will find it as interesting as its meant to be....though im not sure how its going to go!
muchness
xx