Social Media Bundle

I liked the proactive nature of this project. It forced you to solve problems and figure out how to accomplish task on your own, and in the end I realized that it wasn’t that hard. When you raise the stakes for yourself, it is always a pleasant surprise when you can raise to the challenge.  The most interesting accomplishment was figuring out how to connect all of the social networks together. The widget feature on word press allows you to share your twitter, facebook. and delicious account on your blog. When your blog takes up more space on the internet the more likely someone will stumble across it which I hope gets my blog some more hits! The design elements and voice of my tweets and facebook statuses all involving mastering rhetorical situation and comfort in different in environments.

Activist blog thoughts #2

When I first landed on the topic of my activist blog, I worried that I would not have the material to sustain it for 12 posts. What a fool I was. Modern feminism not only had a constant flow of new material to cover but the material spanned from politics to media to clothes to sports etc…. The effusive nature of the topic left me scrabbling for the right avenue to take with my blog. In order to master the technique of targeting an audience I wanted to close in a certain type of feminism that would be very meaningful to a specific group for people. Though the more I learned about feminism the more I had to say, though my thoughts seemed to cover the span and were not concentrated in one area.The more I had to say the easier posts became to write and the better I felt about their outcome. Though if I had more time with my blog I would hope it became a little more focused.

Activist Blog Thoughts #1

I read a lot of blogs. I also read blogs similar to my own. My hobby of reading feminist blogs when I myself write a feminist blog is both helpful and damaging. In the theater, acting teachers strictly forbid watching another actor play the same part as you. They tell you this, because their voice and choices will have inhabit your own choices, stopping you from naturally discovering a character. In acting and writing I agree and disagree with this notion. Stealing ideas (not like plagiarism, don’t worry academic authorities) can enlighten you to new ideas and possibilities, instead of crippling you, seeing similar work can be down right inspiring. Though, this wide spread belief did not come out of no where. The negative side effects have me struggling for my own ideas and blog posts that are not simply recreations of other pieces that I have read.

wiki travel post-write

The most interesting part of wiki-travel assignment for me was attempting to mirror the style and tone on the Williamsburg page in order to maintain continuity. The wiki travel site has a page aimed at contributors who don’t know exactly the style in which to write. Having read on wiki sites a lot in the past I sort of knew the style they were looking for but it was interesting seeing it explained. The site instructed those making contributions to find a happy balance between conversational am and boring academic writing. Although they say find a happy balance, I find the scale usually tipped toward the academic side. No, the writing is not totally stuffy and boring but it also lacks any indication of flare or fun in the writing. I found containing my naturally cheeky voice hard because I have been indulging in casual writing on my activist blog.

wiki travel thoughts

I think wiki travel accomplishes a lot of relevant lessons for writing majors like myself. I came to realization after thinking back on the slew of essays that have been my sole product during my academic career. Experimenting with different tone of voice in this assignment, not the causality of my blog or an academic essay. My partner and I choice wikitravel which was both a good and bad choice. It was a good choice because of the multitude of information available and not a great choice because it already had a lot of key information on the site before we made additions. Thinking about what contributions would be meaningful and not just more words was the real challenge. In the end, even though we contributed to the sites detail I think the most meaningful thing we did was edit grammatical errors the disrupt the flow and decrease the authors ethos.

Sakai work

Class Critique 12/4

This class uniquely mixes independent learning with in class lectures and to my surprise the former proved to be the most effective for me. I felt the most valuable assignment was the activist blog because it required knowledge on audience and exigency while all dealing with a topic of your choice (I, for one, picked I topic I could write endlessly about) that also demanded time management skills. What I often found frustrating, the amount of work and flexibility of dead lines added up being a beneficial part of the learning experience. Though, in the future I would seek a little rigid structure in the guidelines to ease the minds of students.  The assignments were all helpful and went along with the aim of this course though I didn’t always feel class time was used effectively to help us with the assignments that we were doing on our own. My main suggestion for the future would be to utilize the time in class in a more structured way to balance the fluidity of the assignments. As someone frightened by updated technology, this course illustrated how easy new technologies can be to learn when you know where to look.

Lynda tutorial response

Web designers draw upon visual aspects used in print media, so even those unacquainted with the internet instinctively know what looks appealing and what doesn’t. Laurie Buruss outlined in her instructional video how to create pleasing aesthetics and why we find them pleasing. Buruss used an analogy of a house with a website, when you walk into a home you instantly draw conclusions about the type of life that is lived their and where the rooms are located. Similarly, when you enter a website, the homepage should create a feeling of familiarity. She drove home the importance of simplicity, meaning and consistency in all aspects of design.  

One lesson that Buruss taught that I found valuable was how to work the navigational toolbar installed in firefox which allows you to strip away design elements in order to understand the architectural aspects better. The toolbar allowed users to see the barebones of the website, practically illustrating the history of the designing process. When dealing with images the tools allowed you to take them away or find out their dimensions. The outline button creates a sort of wireframe by blocking each individual element. Other functions allow seeing all the links, or seeing the site in total linear format. 

I felt that lesson was crucial for understanding web-layouts because it allows potential web-designers to see a blue print. In creating a wireframe, you need to grasp how a website is structured without being distracting by stylish designs. However advanced a web-site looks it usually has a simple construction, most web-sites use this same template. To create a feeling of familiarity that allows easy navigation web designers should abide to this rules of designing. 

Reading Response 5

http://www.sixtiespress.co.uk/

This website misguidedly uses a combination of the organizational structures illustrated in the palmquist chapter. The collage of links that make up the “home” page takes you to the content, each page being accessible from every other page. Though, no information of the site’s content is offered on the homepage so the likelihood of the reader traveling further then the initial page is slim.  In this instance use of the interlinked structure, ironically, provides no structure. This website fails to point out the important information because of the undistinguished hierarchy of content.

The site’s focus is poetry from the 1960’s, so the page containing the bulk of the poetry should highlight each specific poem, right? WRONG. Poems are placed horizontally and vertically making the page look like a giant chart fill with stanzas. The first step in cleaning up the page is separating each poem so each piece is easy to find, dedicating more room to focus on each one. The palmquist chapter urges designers to keep it simple, this site desperately needs to simplify. The only helpful navigational tools are the links at the top of the page listing the authors which direct the reader directly to their poem.

I would develop a side bar which could create a clearer way to navigate. This side bar would appear on every page to provide more of a consistency and repetition of themes throughout the site. Organization aside the design elements make reading and finding information really difficult. The color of the text almost blends in the background color, which opposes the rule of contrast. the links are spaced well, beside the header which overlaps over some of them.

CARP Analysis

http://www.sixtiespress.co.uk/

Alignment

This website actually makes my brain hurt. This site looks like they read about the CARP format and thought the directions were to do the opposite. The ideas lack any sort of separation and seem to be on top of each other. The total LACK of alignment makes me so aware of how efficiently clean and consistent alignment works to focus the content on a webpage. The HeadLine design is aligned to the left which contrasts with the rest of the website, which uses a center alignment.This  choice is weaker then left or right because the formality of symmetrical alignment  looks amateurish. The web designer’s failure to define a visual or rhetorical focal point can be attributed to the horizontal and vertical placement of links. This arrangement throws of the alignment, because the links aligned with the center are not in sync with the links or either side.