Confussion With Change

In last weeks lesson we changed the site over to its own domain http://www.futuristically.net/

Last week only me, Max, Paul and Joe attended. So during the lesson we made ourselves admin on the site. Paul then messaged everybody with instuctions on the change of domain and how to make yourself admin.

Yet still some members of the group, didn't know this and all week have been uploading content onto the old site. This is bad as the new content hasn't been on the new site, also when changed over it will now be a little bit our of date. But atleast they realised after a week, or it could of been a lot worse.

Promo For The Site

Today I sent out e-mails and messages to some of my close friends and family. Now we have our own domian I want to get traffic to the site. By telling my friends and family about the site, hopefully they will check it out and spread the word. If everybody in the group did this, we could have a good amount of people checking out the site.

Google Image Labeler

Today I found out about Google Image Labeler. This is an online game. It works by pairing you up online with a partner who is also using the feature.

Then over a two minute time period you and your partner will;

• View the same set of images.
• Provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see.
• Receive points when your label matches your partner's label. The number of points will depend on how specific your label is.
• See more images until time runs out.

Then once your time is up you can look at the images you have seen, what your partner guessed and your total points!


It is a fun game, but also very handy for Google. The images you look are, are images that Google need to categories. You it is basically free labour. If you and your partner guess the same label, Google can then use this for labellings. This will help with the relevance of image searching.

www.futuristically.net

Today we put our site onto our own domain; www.futuristically.net

Paul was in charge of uploading our site, along with its content and he did this very successfully.

I like that the site has our own domain now, although it sounds silly, I feel like its more official now.

Slider Problems.

The last couple of days I have been uploading content to the site daily. Yet every time I check the website, it seems the slider is not showing the new content.

I signed into the backoffice and tried to find out how to change this myself, with no luck.

I have e-mailed my tutor to ask for help!

Karl Schneider Lecture

In todays lecture we had a guest speaker, Karl Schneider. Karl is the Editorial Director of Reed Business.

The talk was on the future of publishing, and it especially focused on the shifting of journalism to the web.

It was interesting as it focused a lot on how the web is the future. 50% of Reed's revenue is from online.

Moving Widgets!

In my last post you read how I learnt about widgets and uploaded a video. I have been having issues with this since.

I wanted my widget which contained my video of the week to be at the top right hand side of my lifestyle section. This meant I had to place the widget at the top of the primary order, I understand it doesn't have to go right at the top, but very close.

Yet every time I look at the site, my video of the week has moved to the bottom of the page. This can only happen due to two reasons.

The first, for some unknown technical reason Wordpress keeps moving down my video.

The second, somebody in my group keeps moving it from the top.

Personally I think it's the second.

After speaking to my group nobody admits to moving it, I just wish they would understand, my widget being at the top of the primary list, doesn't affect the homepage or any of their individual sections!

So at the moment every time I go onto the site, I am having to again move my widget, which is starting to get annoying.

The idea behind my video of the week is a lifestyle related topic video. I wanted this to be at the top of the page, so if people don't fancy reading some of my lifestyle content they can watch a lifestyle related video.

Widgets

In todays lecture I successful uploaded a video of the week widget and changed the size of the video as it original was too big.

Before todays lesson I had always been a bit scared off messing around with the widgets, but now I feel I can. I plan to change the video of the week, every week.

The first video I uploaded was a video on Stilleto Stoners.

Ground Rules.

Today we all got reminded of the ground rule of the site. The ground rule is we must never delete other peoples work. Although we are all section editors ourselves, everybody esle in the group should have the freedom to write in other sections of they wish.

I am the lifestyle editor, but have written in the technology and entertainment sections. Likewise others have written in my lifestyle section.

I think this is a good ground rule, as I would never want my work deleted.

Uploading Content To The Site

Today I started uploading my content to the site. Obviously I was met with a few problems. My main problem was with images. As worked on my content from home, I did so on word. I then saved my work to my hard drive, and brought my work into uni that way.

The problem was with images. It was easy to copy and paste the text, but word images do not transfer to Word Press. So I had to screen grab the image. You do this by opening your word document, then holding down the apple key, shift & 4. You then can crop the image and save it to the desktop. Then you can upload the image from there.

Mon 19th Lesson

We started today off with an editorial meeting. During this meeting one of our biggest problems is that we are just spending too much time with the look of the site. We are 4 weeks in to this project, yet the theme we were originally using not everybody in the group is happy with.

I like the theme, as I feel it is a good template we can start with. I like the navigation, as it is easy to use. I also like the slider feature that comes with this theme, as I like the way it flashes through the latest news on our site. I think we need to remember that that it is more about the content than the web design. I think we may have forgotten this. I think the reason this has happened we just want to have a good looking site.

At the end of the meeting, the people from the group who were present decided that we will keep our original theme, although this may change by next week!

We also talked about the twitter account we wanted to have for our site. We now have an account open for the site. But decided that in around 2 weeks, when we will be 6 weeks into the project we will start to update the account properly then. As then hopefully the site will have a set theme and a lot more content.

Twitter Update

I now am following 26 people.
Have 5 followers.
And have tweeted!!

5th Octobers Lecture

We started with clearing our website of the dummy content. As last week we played around and filled the site with dummy content. This ended up being a fairly long process as we hoped we there would be a way to just export all, but there wasn't. So we had to deleted page by page. Yet when deleted page by page the slider accidently got deleted from our template, fortunatly Simon was in and helped us restore it.

During this lesson Simon gave me a few cut outs from the London Lite about some upcoming Lifestyle trends; it reminded me that I must start especially looking out for upcoming lifestyle trends.

We then decided to all add our categorises, mine being Lifestyle.

We also looked at CSS again today. Looking at the style sheet and changing some of the elements of the site. This mean later we can all change our sections, making them suit the categorie and clearly be slightly different.

We also started working on our editorial plan today. We decided as a group we didn’t want the site to have its own blog. I think this is because we all are running separate blogs alongside the site, and just felt this year we wanted to move away from blogs.

We then added a few test post to the site, so we could practice categorising them. We then had a few problems. First off all when adding content to the site, only one category can appear on the slider at one time. This doesn’t work for us, as we want the slider to have the latest uploaded news.

To get around this problem we then added a new category, latest news. We each can then tag our content twice, once being tagged in the latest news. Meaning that the slider will constantly be filled with the latest content. This meant that we had this category at the top menu of our site though, but we plan to try and find it on the style sheet and remove it.

Technology4Media

As well as setting up google alerts today, I also signed up for Technology4Media.

Technology4Media distributes technology news to the media. The service provides journalists with the latest breaking press releases from technology companies and organisations worldwide, together with access to images, company profiles and archive releases, PR contacts, online research tools and much more. Additionally, our 'Journalist Alert' service allows journalists to advise PRs of all their current needs.

So also I will be sent a daily e-mail from Technology4Media and if anything intertestes me, can write something for the site.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. So today I set up an account for 'lifestyle trends'. So now each day I will recieve an e-mail about lifestyle trends.

This is very good idea as I can check everyday for any upcoming intertesting lifestyle trends and then could use any of these potential news stories for the site.

Twitter

Twitter - share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world.

In a group discussion at the beginning of the week we were talking about promoting our site. Max is very into twitter and thinks that having our site on twitter would be good for the site. Max is in charge of getting the site onto twitter.

Yet as we discussed this I felt I couldn’t really make an input, as I don’t actually have a twitter account and have never used it. So have decided I should now create one.

Obviously I have heard of twitter but just haven’t ever opened account. Being away from home at uni, I use Facebook a lot to stay in contact with my friends from home, many of my close friends don’t have twitter this is probably why I have never joined.

Sign Up Now.

When signing up first you have to enter the usually information about yourself name, email address etc. Including a username, picking a username was pretty hard. Obviously I’m a pretty late joiner on the twitter frenzy so all of my obvious usernames have already been taken. In the end I settled with – southeastsam. Sam being my name, southeast where I’m from.

The sign up is very quick an easy, there is no sending you a validating email or any of that.

Then it gives you the opportunity to add some twitter users you may of heard of. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard of many of them, and the ones I had I didn’t want to follow. You are then taken to the home page. I then added some ‘friends’ to follow. This included Britney Spears, Michael Moore, Ben Stiller and The Official White House twitter page, to name a few. After adding I then can see what everyone has been tweeting about lately. Immediately I see that Paris Hilton is off to bed now and the Derren Brown got drunk last night and is on his way to Leeds.

I think I might start to like this Twitter thing.

Photoshop Refresher Lesson

In today’s lecture we had a Photoshop refresher lesson. In the lecture we would refresh on how to take an image from the web for our own use. We all started by going on to Google and searched for an image, “Work Load."

We all used the same image. We needed a big image to play with. Although size is not as important for online students, it is for print. Our images size is 400 X 400. When searching for images you can use the refine your image search tool, this enables you to only choose certain images based on their size etc. So this is a good tool for only searching big images.

An issue we do have to think about is copyright. “Copyright is a form of intellectual property that gives the author of an original workexclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain.” Although this isn’t such a problem for print students, as their work will not be public. For us online, our website will be live, so we have to be careful.

Next you open the photograph in Photoshop. As we plan to use the image online it has to be in RGB mode (red, green, blue). When you open Photoshop if it’s not set in RGB mode, you can change the mode by selecting image, and then follow the dropdown menu to mode, then change.
By clicking on image, image size, you will see a box. This box shows us everything we need to know about our image. All images go down to dots. Resolution. You can never add resolution, you can only work with the dots you have.

When editing using the levels, curves and colour balance allow you to make very useful edits. Sometimes this can even save a picture. Another handy tool is the marquee tool, this allows you to cut out areas of the images and then edit then separately, without changing the rest of the photograph. This is very good if you want to lighten up an area of the photograph as you plan to put text over the top of it.

When you save your image the filename is also important. It is best to give you filename something very appropriate and short. As when selecting an image from files, you can usually only see the beginning of the name. So having a long, complicated name will be difficult for you to see, as well as remember. Also when saving for online, you should save – using web & devices. This will give you a good saved web address for example it will have no gaps.

To finish we were reminded to always save the original image, just in case!

First Lesson

For our group project we have to create a website. First of all as there is 8 people who have chosen to do online, we had to decided if we wished to work in 2 smaller groups or one big one. In the end we decided to work as one big group. The main idea behind this is because of content. The more people in the group the more content we can have. This will make the site more like an actual running site, than a student project.

We discussed what we want on our site, we know we want videos and podcasts to make the site full of multimedia. We also discussed on having a twitter account for our site. Although originally we were unsure what we wanted the site to be about. We ended up going for a site on future trends. This meant that we could each be an editor of our own section. We wanted to create an online magazine.

We then categorized the site with each of us being editors.

I'm Lifestyle.

Eoin is Gaming.

Jenn is Green Issues.

Joe is Sport.

Max. Entertainment.

Paul is Media & Culture.

We'll sort out Ken & Emilys next lesson.

We have decided to use Word Press for our site. We decided this as Word Press is more real life, it's what they use in the real world. We decided not to use Dream Weaver as the main problem with it is uploading content. Only one person can upload, whereas with Word Press we can all upload. This gives us a lot more freedom. This way we can all edit more, its our content so we can edit it. I feel this is really good, as its a group project we should all have the chance to upload and edit our own work.

Deadline

Deadline is 4pm Friday 18th December.