Overview of assignment 1

Okay so this is the wrap up for the first assignment:

Blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/

Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernsul

Blog post about flickr:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

Delicious:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan

my post about delicious on my blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

I wanted to use the blog and the other sites we were asked to prepare so that they continue to be useful to me in "real life" - not just for the assignment. I couldn't get into the assignment for the assignment's sake. Taking this approach I have taken my interests and tried to depict and develop them over the length of the assignment task.

BLOG - 18 posts

I have had a blog before, but I felt this was a good opportunity to start again. Previously I was using my blog as a diary site without any expectation or wish for an audience. Now I am beginning to get a feel for the distinction between personal/private life and a professional/public profile that a blog is an important part of, and I am beginning to think of my blog in those terms. I have made a number of posts in my blog. I put up some video links to animators whose work I admire. After my initial enthusiasm for this I realised that there may be bandwidth problems, and from now on I will focus more on links only to external videos which seems more polite.

I have made a couple of posts about blogger. One was about discovering blogger in draft which allows for easy though still limited customisation of blogger blogs. Subsequently I refined the look of my blog with it. The post related to that is here.

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-template-support-for-blogger.html

I know in wordpress it is possible to customise the code for a blog a lot, but I have never been able to work out how to do it to any great extent, in Wordpress, or in Blogger. So I am looking forward to learning more about this later. In blogger in draft mode I did discover the page for editing the code for my blogger site. It is a little complex and not a lot of straight html involved.

I have also made a post in relation to flash and ipad which I think is relevant for this course - to me anyway:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/ipad-flash-and-interactive-books.html

I have made a post in my blog to some of my favourite sites:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-i-was-to-talk-about-my-favourite.html

I have also made a number of posts regarding flickr images that I have posted on my site. Which I have linked to below:

Some examples of links and images that I have placed on my blog from flickr are:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/photos-from-colombia.html

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/venice-shop-windows.html

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/india1.html


I have made links to people's blogs including as listed below. The blogs are interesting - the comments are not so much.

http://beckygsmpiclassblog2010.blogspot.com/2010/03/week-3-posting.html

http://mymel-odrama.blogspot.com/2009/01/beginning.html

http://nicholas-davlouros.blogspot.com/2010/04/tagging-pages.html

http://benwotton.blogspot.com/2010/03/walk-cycle-update.html


FLICKR - 54 items

My flickr site is at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernsul

My blog post on flickr is at:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/flickr.html

This is an edited version of that post:

I have found flickr good to use. I haven't used it before for my images. I have just come back from some years overseas. Beginning to organise some of the photos has been kind of therapeutic.

I have noticed some features which are useful on top of the obvious. One in particular I think I will use is posting directly to blog.
I like the idea of placing things in sets. I tend to think this way and it will help me show the images in a positive way. I am beginning to work out how to make blogger and flickr work together and I am looking forward to developing this as time goes by. I can see how flickr will become a professional promotion tool.

DELICIOUS - 58 bookmarks

My delicious site is at:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan

I have book listed all the student mpi101 blogs that I could find. I got 32 counting my own blog and the main course blog.

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan/mpi104_2010

Here is a link to my post on delicious on my blog:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/delicious.html

This is the text to the blog posting:

I am taking the task of building up my bookmarks in delicious seriously. In the past I have just had a huge jumbled list on my browser and this seems to be much better as I may actually be able to find stuff in the future because of the tagging system. I think it will be particularly relevant for listing tutorial sites and examples of animation and illustration that I admire.

Other sites that use folksonomy include:

http://digg.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://www.propeller.com/

http://www.reddit.com/

Here is my bookmark for a few favourite/ most visited sites. Some comments are in the delicious description:

http://delicious.com/bernardsullivan/favourite_sites

Here is my blog post on the favourite sites:

http://stepstoanimation.blogspot.com/2010/04/if-i-was-to-talk-about-my-favourite.html

I have used tags for delicious and for my blog primarily based on my areas of interest. I look for tags that I will use more than once but not so often that they form too big a group to be useful. I think of it as a filing system. I also try and not have similar words so that tag lists are not split up in an arbitary way, and so difficult to find.