Wednesday, June 4, 2008

THe MPI104 Experience

From this subject MPI104 I have learnt and discovered many new features and services the Internet can provide. Not just how a webpage is made, but how the internet services of Blogger, Flickr, Del.ic.ious work.

Blogger
The blogspot is a great service if you want to get your message out to the wide world. It allows you to express anything and everything. We've seen how powerful it can be with people blogging about the volatile situations in Burma and Iraq. Blogger not only allows you to do the basic stuff such as adding hyperlinks and pictures. I've learnt you can customise colour schemes, fonts backgrounds which deviate from the given templates by learning some basic scripting in HTML. For example I've changed font colour to yellow and added by own background by tiling a picture through HTML.   

Flickr
The site brings the image community together - from professional to amateur. Its intuitive to the user who uploads photos, batches them to a set and shares it with the community through Flickr's networking features. I can share my pool of photos to specific groups with similar interests and allowing me to favourite and comment on other users' photos. 

Del.icio.us
The bookmarking site goes beyond the simple toolbar. It allows users to share there bookmarks, thereby rating a site by how many others have also favourited the site. The site also includes tags which helps a lot searching through sites. I've found this service particularly useful when it came to switching computers, because the bookmarks would be stored online.

Other
RSS is a great way of keeping up to date with the latest headlines from a range of interests and websites. For myself I've been able to keep up with the latest anime being released. This function is specifically organised in Google reader where you can share and favourite feeds and specific articles to groups. In conjunction building my own site in iWeb, I've learnt more about the server side of websites with FTP and how the protocol is used to send/receive data. CSS has been particulary useful to learn, as I've found it to be fundamental when it comes to authoring your own site in a stylistic and unique way.