Posted by Jewls Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:35:52 GMT
You should have seen this one coming – it’s the fourth of five IDM posts for my Interactive Media I course!
This week on the class chopping block: Rustboy, a Flash site for the Brian Taylor short film project.
Read more...Posted by Jewls Wed, 18 Oct 2006 02:53:26 GMT
So for the last week and a half, I’ve been building a Rails application for my HTML course – Interactive Media I. The Final Project for my class is to create a “significant” website by manually coding HTML and CSS, in a small group. Well, we are definitely shooting for “significant.” I’m not going to spoil the surprise – but I’ll tell you it’s Web 2.0ish, and our professor was really excited about the idea.
I’m coding (with much help from the b/f) a lot of Rails for this, and at first it was extremely frustrating. But, I’m starting to get the hang of things and we’re making a lot of progress. My teammate, AJ (a computer sciences major), is struggling to get MySQL functioning on his XP system – but once that’s up, he is going to try and help out with it as well.
At the moment, I’d say a good portion of the back-end is good to go. Now, we need to begin focusing on and implementing the actual design of the site. So, it’s time for all of us to do some Photoshop explorations.
We’re all pretty excited about the site and I think it will turn out pretty well for my first Rails/HTML/CSS project. Stay tuned for the launch, which should be around early December.
Jewls
Posted by Jewls Sun, 08 Oct 2006 16:09:42 GMT
Here it is, the third of five IDM posts for my Interactive Media I class. This weeks website is Jason Santa Maria, a personal weblog/portfolio for a graphic designer in Philly.
UPDATE: Jason has commented on the collection of critiques by our class and I urge you all to read his response. He’s obviously a very intelligent and humble designer and I’m grateful to have had his feedback.
Read more...Posted by Jewls Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:14:00 GMT
It’s been a few weeks since Facebook first started making tsunamis in the sea of social networking sites. We’ve seen the emergence of the News Feed (and the massive backlash that followed), the implementation of an open admissions policy (not so huge, but still a major area of debate – check out the comments on this digg story), and recently announced – a new advertising plan that places ads (either banners or video clips) inside the News Feed will be launched within the next few weeks.
When launching the News Feed without proper privacy options exploded in Zuckerberg’s face, written protest showed its power. Interestingly enough, the venue of our demonstrations was Facebook itself. User-made groups shot up all over the site and within hours had thousands of members. At this moment, the Students against Facebook News Feed group still has 642,000 members.
When Tracy Schmidt suggested that this was Generation Y’s “first official revolution,” I proposed that this first revolution could be the beginning of many:Read more...Maybe now that we’ve got our activism juices flowing, we’ll find the inspiration to work at other issues we feel strongly about but have never had the courage to act on.
Posted by Jewls Fri, 22 Sep 2006 18:06:12 GMT
Well, here is the second of five IDM posts for my Interactive Media I class. I liked this website a lot less than the first one: smallTransport, but I didn’t really like that one much either…
Read more...Posted by Jewls Wed, 20 Sep 2006 02:44:37 GMT
Whoa, this Writely thing is pretty sweet! As long as you have an Internet connection, there is no need to buy Word ever again!!
Here is a good article that got dugg a couple weeks back: Google’s Writely
If your regularly working with text documents this could be a handy tool to access your work from multiple locations and allow others to edit your documents as well. There are so many neat little features to this site – you can do almost anything!
Posted by Jewls Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:55:47 GMT
About a week ago, I posted an entry about a website for my Interactive Media I class. Well, this entry is not for that class, but it is for another class of mine – Social, Cultural and Psychological Implications of Computer-Mediated Communication (more easily referred to as TC491). Recently, we’ve been discussing online identity and deception – how we shape our online profiles, how others perceive us through these profiles, and how deception plays a part in all of it. So, here is a blog post I’ve written for that class about a guy who’s recently stirred up some ethical debate on the topic of digital deception and privacy on the net…
Read more...Posted by Jewls Fri, 08 Sep 2006 14:23:08 GMT
Thankfully, after three days of steady complaint, Facebook has done something about the “News Feed” to calm our vexations. Early this morning, Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, posted to the Facebook blog (which was also simultaneously glued to the top of everyone’s “News Feed” – BUT with a nice little option to ‘Hide’) an open letter of apology. “We really messed this one up,” he says right off the bat… |
Apology accepted. While I’d still like to see more extensive privacy control (click HERE to see current privacy options), I’d like to thank the Facebook team for working so diligently and quickly to fix the problem. For a while there, especially after the last Facebook blog entry Calm down. Breathe. We hear you, (which pretty much accomplished nothing), I was worried that we’d be waiting weeks before changes were made. But you surprised me, Facebook. You realized there was a big problem, worked your asses off to create a functional solution, and implemented it before your subscribers had the opportunity to become bored with their efforts to insist change (in which case[boredom], you probably would have lost thousands of users).
“Gen Y’s first official revolution,” as Time.com suggested, may have been a small one, and perhaps somewhat insignificant (when you toss all the other serious problems that face the world into the mix), but maybe it’s put us on the right track. At least now the world knows that Generation Y can make a difference, maybe this is only the beginning. Maybe now that we’ve got our activism juices flowing, we’ll find the inspiration to work at other issues we feel strongly about but have never had the courage to act on.
So thanks for working with us, Facebook. Now that that’s all done and over with, I say, “Yeah, okay. I can work with this feed thing.” But how about you do me one more favor and make mine work? Since it’s debut, my News Feed has not updated with any new content, it’s just gradually all disappeared. And today it looks like this: |
So once again….wtf, Facebook?
Posted by Jewls Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:12:27 GMT
WTF is an IDM? It’s an “Inspiration Design Model” and I get to critique five of them over the next 13 weeks for my Interactive Media I class. The professor assigns a website for us to look at and analyze, we each comment with a blog post and reply to at least one of our peers’.
This week’s IDM is smallTransport
Posted by Jewls Tue, 05 Sep 2006 23:20:00 GMT
So Thread got to this before I could: Wow…WTF Facebook?!
Read more...
