Month: June 2020

(week 5)

For our final week of Digital Studies 101 we focused on our Mediated Metacognitive Meditation project. This project was designed for us to have the chance to go back to a previous project and make some improvements or add a little more that we didn’t get to the first time around.

I chose to look back on my ‘Digital Methodology’ project on creating our own HTML website. There were a few things that I felt I could have definitely improved on, unfortunately I do not have any screenshots of what the website looked like before these edits but I think you’ll be able to imagine what it might have looked like after I go over what I’ve changed. For starters I fixed a broken font code that enabled it to be viewed from all browsers not just my own. I then went on to add margins on both sides instead of having the text span across the entire page, it gives it a more clean and professional look. I also added italicized titles to all books and movies I had referenced, as well as changing the font size and weight for all headers and body paragraphs. I added more to each of my descriptions of the project that gives the reader a bit more insight on the things I was trying to accomplish and how I might have gotten there or how I may have failed to get there. I updated certain facts that I talked about and made sure the information was correct. Overall I tried reorganizing the information to be more readable and less distracting.

After the website started falling into place I decided since I was already on the topic of web redesign I would take another look at my bIog and I decided I have been waiting far too long to update my blog page and make some major changes. So from there I decided to change the background image of my blog in order to make the text more readable. I then took the professor’s advice and stated to embed links into certain areas of my blog that weren’t very clear. Such as my social media sidebar, all of which needed to be a direct link to make it easier on the viewer/reader. I then went ahead and changed the basic colors of all links, headers, titles, and text to create a similar color scheme to the background and it turned out great. I deleted some cluster and added some small things like the website icon.

I had originally set one simple goal “to create a more appealing and effective web design” There was a lot that fell under that category for both my website and my blog, however I was able to nail down the biggest problems I saw and the result was exactly what I was imagining. There can almost be improvements and I won’t settle for just ‘OK’, but I was really happy with what I’ve done thus far.

SHARING

Twitch Stream

(week 4)

WHEW! Another crazy week of catching up but I’m finally back on track! Thank goodness. This week we only had one main project which helped and for me I had taken into to data science in the past so I was at least familiar with some functions that we would have to use this week. We were given four options; Cultural Analytics, Networks, Text Analysis, and Digital Journalism. I very quickly jumped on Cultural Analytics after seeing the barcode creation of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. I thought this idea was extremely interesting and I almost immediately knew what movie I wanted to do “The Maze Runner”, I go into a lot of detail about how I approached this, on the subdomain I created for this project, but I had a lot of fun and learning more about shortcuts and html in general was really cool. Computers are something else man. Once you get into it and have your general structure it just comes down to trying new things and checking them on your site to see what’s missing. I used w3schools a lot and they had everything I needed to complete the assignment and the rest comes down to personal touch and what you feel can be added to best increase the general appearance of your site. I’m really happy with the work I did this week and I think my website came out absolutely perfect to what I had imagined. I would give myself an A+ considering the work and the small extras that I was able to add to my site such as a unique backgrounds, different fonts, interesting hyperlink highlights, and more. This was one of the coolest projects yet and being able to look at an entire movie on one screen at the same time was incredible and something I would have never thought about. 10/10 would do for fun, haha.

(week 3)

Well for me, these past couple weeks have been absolutely crazy! As a part of the Army reserves my unit got called up to protect the rights and safety of those protesting as well as be a support unit for local Police. So during that time I wasn’t able to participate in this class and coming back just yesterday from the mission I can’t even express how grateful I am for such a well organized professor. He makes everything easy to access and easy to understand. On top of that he’s always near a device if you have any questions which is amazing. It’s like having 24/7 customer service! Haha, but on a serious note I was able to find what I wanted to do for the object lesson relatively fast and get started on that, I think the biggest time constraint was wanting to go back and watch all of the archived lectures that I missed, but in the end were extremely helpful. I think in all this rushing around and gathering my ideas and thoughts and coming back from the mission all flustered, I might have missed some things and I’ll be curious to find out what those were once the graded reflection comes out for this week. But overall the week went well. Because I was feeling a bit out of it and might have put less effort in as I was trying to complete this more quickly than anything else I would give myself a B for this week. But hopefully I can get caught up quickly and finish week 4 as well within the next few days before week 5 (our final week) comes up!

(week 3)

This laptop started off in someone else’s hands, purchased brand new from Toshiba in 2005 by our neighbors next door. The Rosenthals had bought this laptop for work purposes but as they approached retirement and the search for a new home in florida they decided they would hand it off to my family in 2013. My family used the laptop from 2013 to 2017 when it started to become obsolete due to the laptop only being able to survive on the charger at all times, however the laptop was not dismantled until May, 2020 when my siblings and I decided to shoot pellets at it, completely destroying it. Lucky for us we still had it back in May and I was able to go into it and take it apart even further and find some pretty interesting components. It’s nothing like a desktop PC, so that was fun for me. Unfortunately we have gotten rid of the laptop since then so I don’t have access to photographs but this was recent enough that I can still recall what components I pulled from it and some of the other materials I found were. Learn more about the time I spent with this laptop and all that I was able to recall on what happened in its lifespan!