More messing around with HTML.. I though that I would try to use HTML to create a blogpost insted of providing examples of how to do it, so lets see how far we can go with this
And yes, I am aware that this is vey basic stuff, but I felt like I needed the practice..
So far so good
I figured that this post must have some interesting content and not just different HTML stuff.. So I decided to make a list over things that I have done lately, and which of them i liked/disliked.
LIKE
DISLIKE
Gone to Parklife
Seen Graped of Wrath
Ordered tickets home
Got two bad marks
My legs hurt
Had cheap/bad food for three months
Gaaah! I couldn’t figure out how to put those to on the third row under the LIKE and DISLIKE..
LIKE
DISLIKE
Gone to Parklife
Got two bad marks
Ordered tickets home
Had cheap/bad food for three months
Seen Graped of Wrath
My legs hurt
Awesome friends
Been moody for no reason
HURRAY!
So that took a while to figure out, but I got it. For every table row you can fit in two columns (unless you choose to use more) and the first one goes to the left and the second to the right.
Did I do good?
Whatever you might think, here’s some commercial for myself. Look! My blog within my blog!
That’s some serious inception shit right there..
Hmm.. with the help of w3schools I managed to get this far.. It seems like the blog isn’t capable of dealing with more advanced HTML (correct me if I’m wrong), so I might just end it here.
Thank you so much w3schools!
EDIT
Just realised that my blog within a blog doesn’t show It did when I previewed it, here’s proof!
So just a few days after my rant about Facebook I was going through Norwegian webpages to get an update of what interests the newspapers of the country.
At the top of one of the biggest ones were an article about how Facebook monitors you even after you’ve logged out of your account.
Moootherf*biiiiiiiip*
Since I’m not quite terrified enough or maybe because I lack the skill to do much investigation on my own, I’m really happy that there are people like Nik Cubrilovic. He is an Australian man who describes himself (on his blog) as an entrepeneur, hacker and writer. Maybe he’ll be able to teach me some helpful stuff? Who knows, anyhow (is that even a word?) I found his blog very helpful on this given subject.
“Dave Winer wrote a timely piece this morning about how Facebook is scaring him since the new API allows applications to post status items to your Facebook timeline without a users intervention. It is an extension of Facebook Instant and they call it frictionless sharing. The privacy concern here is that because you no longer have to explicitly opt-in to share an item, you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see.” see more
Another page which was more related to the subject I brought up in the previous post about Facebook gave a better description of how they manage to monitor our moves online.
I’m sure most of us have seen those small facebook/tumblr/twitter and other sorts of social widgets that allows you to post the article or product on the given platform. I’m think I even have it on my blog. These widgets allows you to quickly and easily repost something you found interesting and want to share, and seem pretty harmless. In The Wall Street Journal Amir Efrati writes that when you press these buttons it is not just a fun tool to share pages with your friends, it also allows the makers collect data about the different pages you are visiting.
“These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.” more here
It appears that in order for this to work, the person must have logged in to Facebook only once in the past month. I’m sure I’m not alone to about visiting Facebook almost every day, which means that most of us are leaving quite a solid trail after us around the internet.
And for those of you who doesn’t have Facebook:
“But Facebook says it still places a cookie on the computer of anyone who visits the Facebook.com home page, even if the user isn’t a member. Mr. Taylor says Facebook uses such cookies to protect the site from cyberattacks by people who try to break in to users’ accounts, among other things.”
Yeah so yeah.. I don’t think I’ll delete my account yet, but I will keep an eye out to see if commercials “perfectly suited” for me appears.. This is what I could find right now.
I’m suspecting that RMIT is either lacking money to get the wanted lecturers to come in, or they’re just lazy. Whatever the reason might be, I’m not complaining as this gives me one more hour of sleep monday morning.But as a responsible student (who’s marks are getting worse for some strange reason, which is an issue I’ll address in another post) I still take time to watch and research the online material.
So this time the lecture was about Copyright and Creative Commons
Just to get straight to the point about Copyright.
Copyright law gives you the right to make copies. One would assume that this is logical for most people, but Shaun Miller repeated it about six times just to make sure.
Copyright gives you the right to copy your work, but it also prevents others from making copies of it. Then there’s the question of what can be put under the law of Copyright. Miller presented these options:
- Literate works (books, poems, scripts)
- Artistic work: paintings, photographs and sculptures
- Dramatic works: stage movements, choreographed
- Music works
And with the 20th century technology came a new field: subject matters other than works. This includes films, sound recordings and broadcasting
So I bet creative people (who for some reason isn’t introduced to copyright yet) are bubbling with curiousity of how to get this fenomenal protection of their work. Well, it’s surprisingly easy. As soon as you’ve made it, it is yours. By saying that I need to specify that it is not enough to make up an idea. If you tell a fellow filmstudent about your amazing idea, but haven’t written it down or filmed it, he/she can take it. This reminds me of what happened when I told Christopher Nolan about my idea of making a movie about people breaking into other people’s dreams to plant or steal ideas.. That bastard
Back to the subject. This is one of the conditions for what makes a work eligble for copyright: it has to be in material form. Miller described it as “any work you can drop on your foot” can be put under copyright law.
The other requirement is that it is original, and if you need a further description of that you’re a fool. Something that haven’t been made before, get it?
This is quite embarassing actually, now that I’ve been making subtle fun of people who doesn’t understand copyright. When I came to Australia I noticed that there wasn’t many good “wear-your-seatbelt” commercials (at least thet I have seen), while in Norway there are heaps. I actually thought I could take the idea and make an almost identical version of it, and then sell it and become a millionaire.
It is pretty effective, and a really good idea. However, it became clear in the lecture that even if it is made in a different country, it is still copyright. The reason for this is the internatiol treaty Bern convention. All signatory countires to that treaty (151 countires) own resiprocal copyright. If you own copyright in Australia it also incluedes all the other contries who is part of it. And btw, how is Bern just “a little city in Switzerland”? I think it is worth mentioning that it is THE CAPITAL.
Duration of copyright: In concept of works copyright last for 70 years after the creator has died. Copyright after death would go to his/her estate (closest relative?). Miller explained that the increasing amount of Jane Austen films is because the novels have now gone out of copyright.
When it comes to Subject matter other than work: copyright lasts for 70 years after the content was made.
This makes me wonder.. If a film is out of copyright after 70 years, don’t you have to take for example the scriptwriter into consideration? A script is considered a literate work, which means that it would be out of copyright 70 years after he/she has died. Or is it because the copyright was given to the production team in trade for money? I must try to remember this for the tutorial..
Miller also talked about how copyright is important so people will be encouraged to make creative works. If you didn’t receive any money on your first movie because everyone was copying it, would you be as inclined to make a new one?
These days it is so easy and so cheap to copy works that it is becoming an issue for people trying to make a living out of it.
I think this is a suitable time to introduce a little clip from South Park
Nah really, I see the point of copyright.. but still..
Fair dealing exeptions allows you to copy without copyright: even though someone owns copyright, there are certain cases where the law says that there is an overriding public good principle where you can copy it without permission.
- If you’re copying something in the purpose of study (ten% of the book)
- If its for the purpose of criticism. Show small excerpts.
- It is for reporting news. When Steve Irvin died news channels showed footage from the crocodile hunter. Didn’t need permission because of context of reporting news
- If it is parody. Satire.
Creative Commons is a movement that started in America, who believe in a free sharing society. Why should culture be restricted? They are for sharing, copying and even remaking of creative works, as this will create a more, as they call it, Free Culture. Free in terms of that you dont have to pay for it, but also that it flows freely, it is free for the public.
In some way it seems like a good way for people to share their works if they perhaps isn’t well known yet; if music were limited to only people who pay money for it I’m sure the industry would look very different today.
According to CC there are many creators who are willing to create works that are free for the public, and this can be seen in the endless music pieces, photos and videos online.
The famous Copyright symbol is getting some competiton from this symbol:
This symbol tells you that you are free to use the work in any way you want to. Download it, copy it, remake it, etc. If you make a film, you can choose if you want to add Cc.
Personally, I don’t know what I would do if I ever were to make a movie. I guess that the first starter ones could be Cc, but it is an expencive industry if you don’t have any income. It is a tough question, but maybe someday everything produced will be free to use.
Just to finish of, here is something Miller said that I found useful in terms of copyright:
If you think it is worth stealing, then it is worth protecting
Remember I talked about using the slicing tool in Photoshop as the method for linking the different images on our webpage? That didn’t happen. But I’m not whining, at least I know that it can be an option.
Instead we decided to create a map image code, which means finding the location of the image we want to link from within the full image (I think this sentence is a product of my poor english and my lack of html language, but bear with me). We did this in Photoshop by opening the Information button on the left hand side, then holdind the arrow over the image to find the x and y properties. When it comes to the code used in the image map we had to provide the x and y properties plus the size of the image (I use image here for the piece within the main image that we are going to link from).
Rosa, who is the proud owner of Adobe Flash, have been playing around and has made an AMAZING cloudbook. From her blog:
“What each bubble was linking to was a cloud book – this was managed by making a flipping book animation flash file, made in InDesign, exported to flash, then finding a code to embed the flash file within the website. That was easy enough, then it was just positioning with <DIV STYLE=”position: absolute; top:__px; left:__px;”> tag to put it infront of the cloud made in photoshop and putting it in the <body> of the html file.”
Oh, and I’ve been sneaking around to get inspiration from other students blogs. Cinzia Sammassimo had a couple of links to very helpful youtube videos, and I decided to save them here so I can revisit them if I need them.
It all started when I came across this image on Imgur
At first I laughed because there were talking pigs there. Talking bacon, pahaha. Then I read the text underneath and instantly stopped laughing.
What happens on Facebook stays on Facebook.
There has always been talk about Facebook and how your privacy online is never as good as you think it is. It’s somehow an extention of the famous Las Vegas quote; What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. However, when you swap Vegas with Facebook the quote instantly gets a bit more troubling (unless you’re the fiancee of the man who just had his bachelor party in Vegas).
The rumour/theory/fact that everything you put on Facebook stays there is honestly not something I’ve been giving much thought, as I haven’t had many outrageous photo’s posted of me or joined a group planning terrorism etc. Maybe I’ve chosen to ignore it because it seems secure and reliable.
Whatever the reason for my lack of worry might be, there is no questioning that the information people can find about you on Facebook might become troubling for you at a certain point.
In my brief research I came across an article about criminals who was caught by the police with the help of Facebook. One fugitive charged with murder was found after he updated his workplace on Facebook, another one added a former Justice Department official to his list of friends (which made it easy for the police to find his whereabouts). There is several different examples here
Like most behaved citizens I can see the positive sides of this; it helps keep our society safe. But which guarantee do we have that someone isn’t accessing our private updates? I’m sure there isn’t many people that are that curious about my personal life, but it is quite unsettling to know that it is possible.
Privacy Changes we should know about
I surely didn’t. I might be irresponsible for not paying more attention to this, but you all know my haircolour.
From Wikipedia: “According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.”
In a closer reading of this I ended up at The New York Times’ website, where they explained that the collection of data about visitors are a marketing trick; when tracing which pages the user enters they calculate which commercials it is likely that the user might get interested in.
“Everyone feels that if we can get more data, we could put ads in front of people who are interested in them,” he said. “That’s the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs.”
- David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, an ad agency in the Aegis Group that decides where to place ads for clients
Just because I love Imgur so much, here’s another Facebook related example
Scared yet? To break it down easily; the web companies follows your movements online, and if you’re visiting a lot of online shopping sites it is likely that commercials for such pages will appear more frequently.
I found the article informative and surprising, have a look here
Another thing I’ve managed to overlook is that “your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.”
- From Read Write Web, this article
This was a change made almost two years ago, but this is the first time it has ever occured to me. It’s a bit worrying that this isn’t information we get before decisions are made.
Just to finish off, here’s a summary of your relationship with Facebook by Bruce Schneier:
Oh.. And on the privacy note.. Remember that your parents might be watching as well.
EDIT, 28th of September
HOLY BALONY!
So just a few days after my rant about Facebook I was going through Norwegian webpages to get an update of what interests the newspapers of the country.
At the top of one of the biggest ones were an article about how Facebook monitors you even after you’ve logged out of your account.
Moootherf*biiiiiiiip*
Since I’m not quite terrified enough or maybe because I lack the skill to do much investigation on my own, I’m really happy that there are people like Nik Cubrilovic. He is an Australian man who describes himself (on his blog) as an entrepeneur, hacker and writer. Maybe he’ll be able to teach me some helpful stuff? Who knows, anyhow (is that even a word?) I found his blog very helpful on this given subject.
“Dave Winer wrote a timely piece this morning about how Facebook is scaring him since the new API allows applications to post status items to your Facebook timeline without a users intervention. It is an extension of Facebook Instant and they call it frictionless sharing. The privacy concern here is that because you no longer have to explicitly opt-in to share an item, you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see.” see more
Another page which was more related to the subject I brought up in the previous post about Facebook gave a better description of how they manage to monitor our moves online.
I’m sure most of us have seen those small facebook/tumblr/twitter and other sorts of social widgets that allows you to post the article or product on the given platform. I’m think I even have it on my blog. These widgets allows you to quickly and easily repost something you found interesting and want to share, and seem pretty harmless. In The Wall Street Journal Amir Efrati writes that when you press these buttons it is not just a fun tool to share pages with your friends, it also allows the makers collect data about the different pages you are visiting.
“These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.” more here
It appears that in order for this to work, the person must have logged in to Facebook only once in the past month. I’m sure I’m not alone to about visiting Facebook almost every day, which means that most of us are leaving quite a solid trail after us around the internet.
And for those of you who doesn’t have Facebook:
“But Facebook says it still places a cookie on the computer of anyone who visits the Facebook.com home page, even if the user isn’t a member. Mr. Taylor says Facebook uses such cookies to protect the site from cyberattacks by people who try to break in to users’ accounts, among other things.”
Yeah so yeah.. I don’t think I’ll delete my account yet, but I will keep an eye out to see if commercials “perfectly suited” for me appears.. This is what I could find right now.
I have an hour before I have to leave the house, so I might as well go ahead and join Twitter!
Wow, that was so easy compared to Tumblr.. Signed right in and I’m already following people! My first person to follow is a guy who’s pretending to be the king of Norway, he is always posting retarded fun stuff.
I tried to find Hugh there, but no luck
My first tweet! Microblogging is eeeeasy peeeasy
Just started following Matthew Bellamy.. Aaaw I feel so close to him already.
It makes me feel a bit like a stalker, suddenly getting updates from people that I don’t even know. Excited to see if anyone starts “following” me haha
To answer the question in regards to the lecture by Adrian Miles
What happens if there is no beginning, middle or end?
How will links change the way you structure your essay?
Since we started on our education (which is 14 years ago in my case) we have been taught to write linearly. The fairytales always started with “once upon a time..” and ended with “and then they lived happily ever after”, and there was always a middle where the prince tried to save the princess. When I started studying film it got a even more complicated shape
Sorry, I really tried to find one that was in English, but I don’t really know what it is called. i Googled “Hollywood Model” and all I got was girls wearing bikinis.
However. Having a beginning, middle and end has not only become something we expect, but we also have expectations to what those sections should include. So what happens when this order gets messed up?
In hypertext there is no “once upon a time” or “and so they lived happily ever after”. There is only a middle, with connections to paths. There is no start page online (apart from this one), neither is there an end (apart from this one). You can always travel somewhere else.
The question is, what happens?
First of all, your hypertext essay suddenly has all the information one could want (depending on how well you’ve linked it). Every link provides a new page of information, which might back up your claim, contradict it, or be about something completely irrelevant. It also makes each page more valuable than what it would be if it was written linearly. Imagine just picking a random page out from a book. After reading it I’m sure you’d be confused, as you would need the information that is found earlier in the book to make sense of it. In a hypertext essay each page (should) speak for itself. As there might be more than one link that leads to it, you can’t expect that people have background knowledge that you have provided on another page.
You put the information on the page before this one? Well, in some cases that person might access the page which functions as the “start” for you last. “Earlier” doesn’t make sense to the reader, cause earlier might come later. Repetition in a hypertext essay therefore becomes important, as people might not now (in this case) who Torill Mortensen is, or why we are writing about Scandinavian blog clusters.
It also means that your writing has to change. People seem to have less patience online, as there are so many options springing up at you all the time. Maybe a page that you have linked to will get their attention, and they’ll stay on it instead of coming back to yours. It’s important to be aware of this, and make sure your essay is something that will suit their short interest span and entertain them. What seems logical to me is that a page in a hypertext essay should be:
- Short
- Colorfull
- Variety of elements (images, text, video, audio)
- Entertaining writing
In terms of the last point, here’s what was written on the powerpoint slide during Adrian Miles’ lecture:
“Traditional forms of writing have tended to emphasise a consistency of tone and writing style that is a product of print technology. At its heart, there is a certain protestant suspicion of textuality in our development of black print on white papet arranged in highly regular patterns across consecutive pages.
This singularity of writing style or voice is the exception, rather than the rule, of our communicative competencies. In any given day I speak as father, son, husband, teacher and student, to name a few, and each requires, often literally, a different voice and style.
Hypertext writing, through all of its formal properties, is able to utilise and incorporates these different voices, these different ways of writing. Hypertext theory seems to validate the inclusion of these diverse tones (or tongues) so that the document becomes not only a palimpsest of what has gone before or into the writing but becomes a plural arena of all those writings that are implicit but excluded in all writing.”
A hypertext essay differs from a normal essay. When I come across a page online which constitutes only of text, I rarely stay for long. However, when I read a book or an essay on paper I don’t have any problem with it. I actually find it easier to read course related content when it is printed than when I have it on my computer, my attention span is shorter when I have internet available. Hence,other elements and text divided between several pages seem to me as a smart solution.
We also need to keep in mind that the academic language that we’ve been drilled in when it comes to essays at school has to change. All the fancy and difficult words that are used become excess; it can be explained just as well in a mora casual language. Personally my focus is kept longer and I remember more when the content is written in a casual, and even entertaining, tone. I have had this as a goal throughout this semester, as I hope can be seen in my blogposts.
How will links change the way you structure your essay?
Having links in the essay makes a crucial change. Pages can contain just the necessary text, it doesn’t have to be dragged out just to fill it up. People can just press a link to come to the next relevant subject. It also allows us to include other pages in our essay, even if they are not related; external links provide examples or documentation of what we have written, but can also send people to pages that we simply like and want to share.
We also have to be careful to repeat what we are doing, so if someone ends up on one of the many pages they will have an idea of what it is about.
Just to finish of; I know this doesnt relate completely to how the hierarchy works in essays, but it is definately completely different from how it works online. Like we were explained in one of the first lectures, it’s not ONE centre that controls it all, it is spread all over with links holding it all together. Anyways, fun way to look at hierarchy in terms of employment..
I have been working on the content for the hypertext essay, and I’m noticing that I’m actually becoming a defender of blogs. Who would have thought that? In the start of the semester I was ranting on about how awful I thought it was that we had to keep a blog and how useless it was for my future career.
Then I wrote my first blogpost. This was a day or two after the attack in Norway happened, and the motivation for writing was a combination of the fear of falling behind at school and a need to express my feelings without having to face anyone.
It felt amazing. I have never kept a diary, and it made me relise how useful writing down your thoughts can be to clear your head.
Seth mentioned this benefit in one of the earlier lectures; that blogging is a way of organising your head. When to much is going on in there it is hard to acheive anything, it all just spins around in a big mess. After writing some of my thoughts down they didn’t disappear, but I could look at it more clearly and distance myself from it a bit.
After some time the blog became a platform for school, my personal thoughts, fun, and interests. The interesting part is that I’m pretty sure that I will continue blogging after this course is finished.
But what do I actually know about blogging?
Quite alot I would say, after reading “Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online tool” religiously and searching the web for more info.
In class today we were discussing which changes there have been concerning blogs since Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker wrote the article. While some students argued that we are so used to all the different “blogging options” I found that I know very little of what many of the different tools offer. The first online platform I used that resembled a blog was something called Blink.no
In many ways it was similar to facebook, exept that it was mainly for Norwegians.
I edited one of my Annotated Bibliography entries (the one about strenghts and limitations in the text), not because I think it will affect my grade (as we get the result tomorrow), but because I found it very useful.
Flickr is something I am vaguely familiar with, as I have a few friends that post their images on there. It’s a good concept that allows people to share their photo’s with the world, and it might lead to useful networking. On flickr the use and benefit of tags really come to use; every photo has a number of tags, and when people search for something the photo’s with that given tag come up.
As I’m no great photographer I haven’t joined yet, but I’m keeping it as a possibility for the future. Tumblr on the other hand seems like something I can cope with, as it is more about reblogging than posting your own creations.
I’ve decided to join and let you lucky people follow my journey towards my first post on tumbler. Aren’t you lucky? And if that goes well (and fast) I’ll try to access the microblogging tool Twitter as well.
Alright, here we go.. www.tumblr.com.
Ah there we go, I’m already confused. Where’s the “sign in” button??
Hm. turns out the whole startpage was dedicated to signing up.. and they are asking me to put in my email, a password and an url.
????????????
I tried adding the URL of my blog, but it wouldnt allow me. “32 characters or less” it said.
As we know I am quite a genious, so I figured out that they wanted me to creat MY url. And voila! I have my own url! It is http://playingstupid.tumblr.com (I think)
So now I only have to figure out this:
Jesus Christ, there are endless themes to choose from.. One of my biggest struggles these days is that we have way to many options on every aspect of life (Geee, sound any more like a douchebag Sunni.. #firsteworldproblem )
Like education! I trip out nearly everyday thinking that I might have chosen the wrong course, maybe I’ll benefit more from being a fisherman. And cereal! Oh my God, CEREAL! Have you SEEEEN the shelfs in the supermarket?
Anyways. The first themes I was introduced to cost money.. not quite there yet.
You can create your own theme using HTML, which I intend on doing soon but not now as I’m about to go to a friends leaving-work-party and I’m not quite dolled up yet..
So I chose this one
Then I went back to the page with all the options and I’m uploading a random photo at the moment.
The thing with tumblr that interest me the most is that it’s so much about reblogging, How does that work in terms of copyright? Most of the images on the pages I’ve seen are not taken by the people owning the blog, they are mostly reblogged.Hopefully I’ll figure this out shortly!
So now I’ve been playing around for a bit, and I have posten an image, a post and a quote. I have even reblogged an image from Ian Ngo’s page!
It’s the easiest thing in the world. You just press “reblog”. And then it’s done..
Here it is!
I don’t have time right now to get started on twitter, but if i get home early I might..
See you on tumblr! xx
It did when I previewed it, here’s proof!
Just to get straight to the point about Copyright.
