Networked Media Production Week 3

Alright, this week's lecture was mainly about HTML and CSS. I'll be honest, I had absolutely no idea what they were before the lecture, and about 20 minutes in I thought my brain was going to shut down due to CITBCHATTO (Confusing Information That Brain Cannot Handle At This Time Override). It's just a matter of becoming familiar with all of the tags and what they mean, I understood HTML and CSS a little better after my tutorial. I found the more I used it and the more I became familiar with the tags, the better I understood the meaning of HTML and CSS, so an important tutorial for me. Anyway there is this site that I was looking at - http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/ - It has a list of tutorials that explain in detail every aspect of HTML including a big list of tags. Another interesting site is-http://www.w3schools.com/css/ - which has a lot of information about CSS and also has a useful little 'try it yourself' button that brings up another page which shows you exactly how it works, it's pretty useful especially when learning for the first time, here's the link for that page-http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_default . So yeah I was a little worried at first about HTML, but now that I have used it and am familiar with some of the tags it's actually not as complicated as it first appeared to be, especially once understanding the basics. I think it's one of those things that if you don't know what it is, and it looks really confusing, it can come off as a little intimidating, especially when finding the motivation or the interest to learn it. But once you do learn it, it's really useful and is something you can definately have fun with.

Networked Media Production week1/2

WELL! This is my first time writing a blog so this is all very new to me. Various topics have been covered in the lectures, some in particular that I found to be quite interesting which I will get to further on. This week we talked a lot about blogs and how it has become a very popular way for people to express themselves, to pretty much talk about anything they find interesting, talk about themselves, stories, different websites, media events etc. and to share it with the rest of the world. A topic that i found interesting is Samuel Pepys' diary, when reading some of his entries its pretty much a blog written on paper in the 17th century. Here's a link to one of his diary entries http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1667/02/18/ Another site - http://blog.larkin.net.au/2007/11/15/pepys-diary-the-worlds-first-blog/ briefly talks about what Pepys writes in his diary, and how he includes 17th century English lifestyle including music, food, games etc. These topics are most popular to talk about even in today's blogs. In the lecture we also talked about Heather Armstrong, initially she started a website to talk about topics such as pop culture and music, much like the topics Pepys includes in his diary. Even though Heather was fired from her job talking about work without permission, her style of writing has become very popular, she 'monetized' the situation and now considers herself to be a professional blogger. http://www.dooce.com/about - This is Heather's site which also includes information about herself. What I find so interesting is how similar Pepys' diary is to today's blogs and how over the years different styles of writing and expression has not changed as much as technology has. Anyway that's my blog for this week.