Another big shiny account to have now is Dreamwidth, but I don’t really see hordes of people flocking there either, although it does look promising (let’s give it a year or two and wait and see). I do have to say there’s been some pretty good comms set up and discussions are sane and friendly for the most part~ That said, if anyone wants a DW invite code, I haven’t used my spares! Although I’d rather give them to people I know in person rather than people I don’t. However I doubt I’ll be getting a paid account to DW anytime soon, unless at least 70% of my friends migrate AND post there regularly. But then it means my customization and user options are currently limited to that of a free user. Though I do have to give kudos to the people who founded DW~

And Apple now joins the ebook reader frenzy! The thing about ebook readers… will they become popular out of the states? It doesn’t seem to be promoted overseas much. Although during the magazines class, our lecturer brought up a good point: if universities could help students cut costs of textbook buying by providing every student with a kindle stuffed with regularly updated textbooks it’d be brilliant. Less burden on student’s pockets (especially international students) and textbook publishers can update their content with one click (so it’d be friendly for the environment as well, because seriously, having to buy a $100+ tome and not being able to sell it off because they grow outdated the next year is a pain.

Hm, nothing much else to say, except, this is the last week of classes! And I’ll be graduating in August. Wow, that’s fast.

I really don’t get the hype over the kindle. For one thing it looks pretty big and awkward to carry around. And nothing beats actually flipping through the pages of a book. The only advantages I can think of are that it’s good for previewing books without having to pay for the full price of a physical book, so you can buy and sample lots more. Also it saves space in the longrun. It’s also not cheap. For that price I’d rather get a different gadget like an ipod or digital camera.

Other than that the group website project is going well so far. At least we have a site up and some of our commissioned articles up as well. This is probably the most interesting and fun assignment I’ve had to do this semester. I’ve also completed my essay for magazine publishing on the topic “Is the print magazine dead?” I had to look up stats and figures of magazine sales and related ad sales, as well as the reports of magazines that either shut or shifted totally to digital format. There was alot I was unware of, so it was interesting at least~ Most of my classmates chose the interview someone in the mag industry topic but unlike them I don’t have contacts since I don’t have much work experience in the industry or much work experience in general. Sometimes I do find it a bit intimidating to be in a class with people who are older than me and have more experience, some each working in the industry itself, but everyone has been pretty friendly so far, so it does ease my thoughts somewhat.

Anyway, I want to introduce a newsblog I read which I find interesting. I don’t read it often (I already have about 100+ entries to follow on livejournal daily so I don’t have the time to catch up with news as well aside from running the tv when I’ve having dinner) but they’ve got some interesting articles.

The site/blog is called Mashable.com and it’s all about social media news. Recently they had an useful post for those paranoid about the swine flu outbreak, in an article entitled How to: Track Swine Flu Online .

Speaking of the swine flu, one of my friend’s friends came up with a clever nickname for the swine flu. She called it Hamthrax – well I find that funny at least~ It’s definitely catchy and easier to pronounce.

Also Ning has apparently hit 1 million members and is developing apps to enhance user experience.

I also enjoyed the Iron Spider website that Sarah introduced us to in class. Although I have quite a few links to places I use for html tutorials I have never heard of this one and the explanations on it were clear and easy to understand even though the site design is pretty poor, but at least it’s simple to navigate. A while ago I did a post on my favourite web design sites. I’m plugging it here because some people might have missed it and may find them useful!

The reason why I like Tofugu is because firstly the layout is nice and clean (I like white layouts that aren’t cluttered), does not have extremely long posts (if they are the bulk of the text is hidden under a cut), and the site is very easy to navigate. They’ve got direct links to the sections that are most popular, and links to the more popular and useful articles as well.

And it looks like HarperCollins is jumping onto the comics bandwagon as well. I quite like the using comics to get more people to read idea, but I do hope it serves as an encouragement for people to read actual books and not just look at pictures. That said, my favourite romance series is getting a manga form! I am torn between being feeling delighted, amused and backing away in horror because it could go one way or the other. Previews looks good though. But the thing about the American manga form is that it can’t exactly mirror the exact standards of Japanese manga. I’ll still try to get a copy though.

That said, I’ve also been pondering over the research essay for the magazine publishing project. I’ve decided to do ‘is the print magazine dead?’ so it will probably have some overlaps with the digital publishing subject.

http://themottledgem.net/theonlooker/ – a blog of mainly reviews. slowly putting back the old content. erm, you don’t have to look it you don’t want too~

Anyway, just some comments on some of the platforms and things mentioned in Epic 2014.

Amazon - Even though I haven’t bought things from Amazon (since I have no credit card), I do use it to keep my wishlist of mainly books which I’d like to read at some point, and to read reviews on books left by other users. Looking at people’s recommendations based on ‘Listmania’ lists can be pretty addictive.

Google – This is not really related, but I recently discovered the firefox add-on, Google Previews, which is really neat! It puts a thumnail preview of the website next to each search result. Very handy to know if you’ve already been to the site (for research) or if a site is fishy.

Tivo – I never really got what this is… I don’t use subscription tv in Melbourne but I presume with the ability to record onto the set it’s similar to Foxtel? Singapore has a Singapore Cable Television boxset which is similar. It lets you look at tv listings on the tv (instead of the accompanying montly magazine), and the newest ones allow recording although I think ours is still an older model and not the latest one.

Friendster was really big when I was in highschool. I remember people faking their ages so they could get an account, it was like the Facebook of it’s day but of course now Facebook has overtaken Friendster. I do prefer the profile page layouts of Friendster than Facebook though. Facebook should let users to customize their profile layouts, or at least let us change the layout colours or something basic like that. But I guess the idea of having everyone have the same plain and simple blue and white layout means that you won’t get someone having an irritatingly sparkly and graphic laden page. So there are the pros and cons. I miss the original Facebook layout.

Google buys Blogger - Haha, actually I was really irritated when gmail bought blogger. It was fortunate I already had a gmail account so I could access my old blogger account, but I just don’t like the idea of having to use my gmail details to login. I like my journaling account to be seperate. Which is why I’ve switched to livejournal and wordpress.

Newspapers become newsletters for the elite and elderly – Actually I do like reading the physical newspaper. And I do use the old papers to wrap things up or for protecting the table/floor when I make things. I just love the sound of paper being turned and it’s very nice to not have to stare at the screen all the time. I stare at it enough as it is. So call me an old fogey but I will always support physical newspapers. I do agree with what was said on Epic 2014 in that news that people watch on the net tends to be of a more trivial nature. It’s also easier to keep physical copies of newspaper clippings than to copy and paste articles and print them out. And if you kept things on the computer and your computer died, well, you won’t have them anymore. There’s a lesser chance of your house burning down and destroying your scrapbook or folder of clippings.

In short, while I spend a huge amount of time on my computer and internet, I do not want it to take over the world of news and reading like that. To me the internet is more of a source of communication, entertainment and information (research), but at the end of the day, print just seems more serious? (can’t find the right word for it). And the idea of having to look at the screen even more than I do now and spoil my eyesight further is not exactly appealing either.

Japansoc is a website with a similar concept to Digg, except it focuses solely on Japanese news!

I’m not Japanese but I’ve been thinking of looking for work there after I graduate, so I like to read about the happenings in Japan.

Also, I find this other post useful: Top Online Resources for Learning Japanese for Free.

I already use Rikaichan, an online J-E dictionary which makes browsing Japaneses websites so much easier because if you mouse over words a box will pop-up with the hiragana readings and meaning!

From the post, I was most intrigued by:
Lang-8 – a blogging service that allows people (specifically aiming at native speakser) to correct and comment on your Japanese/Chinese/English/French/Spanish etc posts. It sounds like an interesting learning + social experience in one. And there’s also a ‘notebook’ function for you to save phrases you want to remember. This could be a great way for language learning provided this is your kind of thing.

Concerning web design, I used to search for easy to understand tutorials online and play around with the coding, or download free templates and tweak them.

My Favourite Web Design Help Sites

HTML Goodies – great for the beggining web designer who wants to learn to code a webpage from scratch, since software like Frontpage and Dreamweaver do cost quite a bit.

W3Schools – which has tutorials for many website related things and also a cross-browser compatible colour chart which is very useful.

Code Sucks – has a wide range of basic CSS and a few HTML templates to play with. CSS is useful if you want to position a layout and fix it so it doesn’t widen or lengthen when more content it put in, although it is also achievable by HTML.

CSS Zen Garden – is a very pretty site (I’m a sucker for clean and simple whitish layouts), and has some nice design templates as well although they appear to be at a more complex level.

Colourlovers - Shows possible palettes and combinations of colours you can use on your website~ and gives the colour codes for each colour present in each swatch.

This website – is a resource trove of links to some really good references on web design.

Other Links

Webpages That Suck - what to avoid doing when designing a website.

Top 34 Website Mistakes - there are many articles like these out there though

Design Reviver – a blog on web design. Aimed more at the immediate – advanced designer but some useful articles no less.  Their article on 7 Common Web Usability Problems feature our class’s community portal of choice, Ning! As a good example of keeping your homepage clutter free~

A List Apart – another site with some great articles and a nice design~

22 Firefox 3 Plugins for Webdesigners Can’t Live Without – I’ve been a huge supporter of Firefox since I discovered it and trying out the various plugins offered is so addictive! Some of them have really made my net time so much more efficient and enjoyable. I’ll put out a list of my favourite plug-ins another time, but this article has some that I’ve used at different periods of time~ The three of my tops from the list they have written are Web Developer, Colorzilla and Grease Monkey. I’d like to add in two they did not mention, FireFTP and some of my friends use ScribeFire. They basically save you time from having to open up multiple tabs or windows to upload files to your webhost (FF), or enable you to log in and make posts to various blog hosts (SF) – WordPress is one of the list~

What really irks you most in a web site? For me definitely

- Music or videos that play when you enter the site. It’s very awkward if you’re doing this in a relatively quiet place in public. I feel that if the site creator wants to include a music clip, he or she should give the visitor an option to play it or not.

- Graphics overload! – Limit pictures to a few which make the best impact and get your message across. Also, I can’t stand unrelated graphics..

- Too many colours. Also related to graphics in a way. I like it clean and simple.

- Ads that are all over the place. Please keep your ads to an ad page or in a neat column at the side or a row at the bottom (I almost said top, but I decided those can be annoying as well).

- Pop-up ads.

- IE only or single browser compatible websites – very frustrating to open a site that only allows you to view it in only IE!

- Confusing navigation bars and links. How annoying is it to have to search for hidden navigation strips and links or to click on many things before you get to what you want!

- Layouts with a non-fixed width so they expand and expand – inconvinient on smaller screens and scrolling sideways is a pain!

Etc… There are others but these are the main ones for me

It’s quite ironic how these online storage sites tote themselves as a more convinient way of storing you stuff, but the fact is that the host server or website can be damanaged just as easily as your computer hard drive. So lesson of the day is: always backup to as many places as you can! And also, you won’t always be garunteed that you’ll be at a place that had internet access when you need it, because things like that happen when you least expect it. Also your account might get deleted in random checks… like that huge purging incident that swept through livejournal last year that left thousands of users disgruntled and seeking out alternative services like wordpress and insanejournal. Fortunately I wasn’t affected but I knew people who were. It’s a very long story, which you can read here, and if you google “LJ Strikethrough 2007″ You’ll find quite a bit of material on the issue. I think that it would actually make an interesting case study on censorship on the internet.

Lastly, I’ve been having a think of what I should do my website presentation on since my turn is coming up soon. I’m tossing up between livejournal, deviantart and smugmug because I have accounts in those three places. Livejournal would be ideal because I use it on an everyday basis and am therefore more familar with it.