Markup structure and stuff.

(Note: The main reason why I'm posting this now rather than back in week 3 is the fact that this and several other blog posts were half written as drafts at the time. I blame mostly myself, I think I got a bit too caught up with carving...)

Ok in this weeks class we learned a bit more about html amongst other things, and how to mark up a design.

One of the basic concepts was about nesting: Basically because tags work with brackets, you can put multiple tags within one line of code so that they all work together.


After we got a quick tutorial through that we moved onto marking up a simple dance website Philippa had made for us to use. How nice. Here's what the original looks like.

Turns out marking up the design was a good introduction into just how technical web design can get. Lots of meddling with code, but it's satisfying to get it right.

I also integrated a Twitter feed into my blog, turns out a lot of social media sites will provide code for a plugin that you can put into your blog. This is pretty easy to do, and I'm glad that they provide this service.
I haven't really given twitter much of a proper use yet, but I can see it's usefulness for sure.


Stay tuned!

HTML, Social media and how the web works

As a kid I can remember mucking around on the Internet one day and finding the source code of a website. It was a weird experience to see the inner workings of a website, as it was a massive wall of multicoloured text with thousands of unintelligible characters. And now I'm here to give you a very basic introduction as to how it all works.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and my impression of it so far is that it seems to be the skeleton of websites. Really it makes up the basic layout of a website and once you get your head around it, it's not that hard to understand. (You just have to remember all those tags...)

Html works by using tags within angle brackets. A simple example is making a piece of text bold. You take your text, and enclose it like so:

                   Apricot -(our text we wish to change)

+

                <b> </b> -(the bold tag we need)

=

Apricot

You might have come across this simple tag if you've participated in a discussion forum before, as they allow you to use some tags like this.

To expand on it further, here's a really simple example from w3schools.com.

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

And you'll end up with something like this:

My First Heading

My first paragraph.



Now that's all out of the way, here's a some links to some of the social media sites that I use:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LordOfApricots
Deviantart:  http://apricotproductions.deviantart.com/ (occupied with mostly old 'artwork' I'm afraid) 

References: 
www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_intro
- date of retrieval: 14/09/2013

Blogs. Websites. Ones I like, ones I don't like.

Part of our assignment was to post some examples of our favourite blogs and websites, I'm going to take this a step further and post all the crappy websites and blogs that I don't like as well.

Good

http://howardlyon.com/blog/home/ - A blog with great content and a website that compliments the quality of the content.

http://www.lovelaneny.com/index.php - This is a well designed website for fancy pants high end real estate in New York, in fact it's so high end that when I got curious and decided to look the cost of some of these places, I'm pretty sure my eyes started to bleed. 

Personally I think the whole theme is a little sappy but the smooth animations, crisp photos and good layouts work well. I'm pretty sure it works for their perceived target market too. 

http://www.threadless.com/ - Modern, simple design is featured here with copious amounts of hipster tattoos, pop culture references and those god awful glasses that everyone seems to wear these days. 

Bad

Note: a lot of these blogs have brilliant content, but really poor web design.

http://anthonyvanarsdale.blogspot.co.nz/ - the problem here isn't so much bad web design as it is a lack of design. It seems like the artist doesn't really care about the layout and design behind his blog. That's not necessarily a bad thing, at the end of the day it's about his art and that's all that matters. But I'm sure a bit of effort put into the design of the blog will compliment his artwork a lot better.

http://www.marknewmansculpture.com/ - This guy is an amazing sculptor, I'm quite familiar with his work but Papyrus fonts and blue and red contrasting colours just don't work together. And everything's so damn small!

http://www.russianswords.com/Stalingrad-sword.htm - This one is pretty self explanatory, cyan and neon green...

The History of ..THE INTERNET...

Big topic. One that will be hard to fully explain in a blog post.
So many people in this world access it today, and it's very easy to take it for granted.

I guess the question is, how did we get from this;

To this?

Well let's find out...

(This blog post will cover the formation and early days of the Internet.)

First off, we need to make a distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The Internet is a globally connected system of computers that serve their user's needs.
The World Wide Web is the service that runs on the Internet and holds all the resources that we access.
Got it? Good.

So how did the Internet come into this world? Well, it all started way back in the 1950's when the first computers were being pushed to their full potential. It had its humble beginnings with a simple message that was sent from the University of California to the Stanford Research Institute.

They were using an early version of something similar to the Internet called ARPANet, which was introduced around about 1970. It was a connected network of university and research computers. More and more institutes joined and saw the potential of this network. Eventually as other networks were being founded in various countries around the globe, they started to become increasingly interconnected.

In the 70s through to the 90s, things like e-mail, pc modems, spam, domain names and most of the basic ingredients of the Internet were invented during this time.

Then the World Wide Web was born.
The first proposal for a collective storage system for links, pictures and text came from Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, which was also the year that the first commercial internet service provider was launched. After that, the Internet started to become more and more accessible to the average user, with things like easy to use web browsers being implemented. Through the mid 90's to the beginning of the new millennium, things such as webmail, file sharing, better access, Google and Wikipedia were invented.

So I guess that's a fair blurb on how the early internet came to be. Currently we're dealing with internet privacy issues as our lives become increasingly interconnected with the internet amongst other things, so the future is definitely going to be interesting...





Image credits:

1 - http://photos.myjoyonline.com/photos/news/201211/370895532_532414.jpg

2 - http://www.joeydevilla.com/2010/07/10/bacon-space-kitty/

The Generic Welcome Page

Hello people, this will be my blog for the Web Media 1 course that I am currently taking.

Through this blog I'll posting the topics required by my project brief, and anything else that I find interesting that relates to art and web design.

Stay tuned.