IAD: presentation

So tomorrow is the big day in terms of our presentation assignment, I am fairly confident. I feel I have been very organised this terms when it comes to assignments, and have had the presentation ready for a while now which has given me the benefits of getting feedback on the presentation as well as two run throughs on a projected screen, thanks to Max Hobbs for sitting through them I hope you enjoy it third time round ha, least you know more about CMS hey!

ATWD - resources for February assignment

Another assignment released, making a restful service...

What is REST?

Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding[1][2] in his doctoral dissertation. Fielding is one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification versions 1.0 and 1.1.


From what I can make of it Restful services is a way of trying to get designers to write up systems how the web was meant to be written, and in a format that can be read by computers and then style sheets to be made to produce the file in a human-readable format aswell.




http://webservices.xml.com/lpt/a/1388

* http://themoneyconverter.com/RSSFeeds.aspx

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217#Active_codes

* http://www.xe.com/symbols.php



----
* = Prakash's resources

IAD: Presentation

So presentation is less than a week away and I have completed my slide show and have already had a quick run through of my first version. I have since then made a few changes to my slide show including less comparison on just 2 cms technologies and looked at cms as a technology at a more general view.

My current slideshow can be found here

Photos:

DMP: Poster preparation

This week I have finished my poster and have had a run through of the poster using 2p06 to see how my poster would look projected on the screen.

Here are the photos of this..



As you can see the poster doesn't fit very well so I changed it to portrait (although the content was on its side) and it made a better fit therefore I have now editted my poster and will be testing it Tommorrow to see if it has a better fit on the projecter after the changes I have made.

DMP: Poster

With the poster deadline coming up .. 2 weeks to go.. I have completed my first rough poster, I am going to try and have a look at it in the room we have booked for our presentation at some point this week to see whether the allocated areas are the right size, I'm feeling confident about this assignment and hope to have my progress report and some notes to help present the poster by Monday.


My Poster's Link

Standing Out!

I have editted my blog now so that each module blgo post has a different colour so it stands out, this will make it easy to spot which post is for which module.

I am also becoming a bit of a blogging fan!!

DMP: Progress

This week I have contacted my client and asked for a copy of all the companies on the trading estate and their contact details. I have decided to do my project a bit backwards as my client is based in Dorset. So it will be alot easier for me to work on my client research and bits and bobs when I am home over the Festive Period.

So for now I am going to send out an email/letter to all companies explaining the project that has been put forward and to get any initial ideas from them.

I have also been playing around with the layout and getting a simple basic trading estate website up and running, I'm not too worried about the design as much at this stage and am focusing more on getting the backend and technical side working.

I am also going to be looking at PHP sessions and trying to get my head around this!

http://www.chardesign.co.uk/uwe/cms/framework/

ATWD: Looking at this week

This week we summarised what we have learnt already and what we are going to be looking at in the next 6-8 weeks. I have decided to start blogging on this module aswell as if anything it can work as a source to help revise when the EXAM TIME hits us!

The following subjects are what we will soon be looking at.

Rest/ful
Feeds - Atom, RSS
Restful architecture
XML
name spaces
MicroFormats
AJAX
HTML 5
google wave
Semantic Web
Topic Maps
RDF
MVC patterns


I have also included Prakash Chatterjee Blog RSS on to this blog, it can also be found here.

IAD: Presentation assignment

So one presentation down and now to prepare for the next, with this one being a marked assesment.

For my presentation this time I have to look at a technology, I am going to kill two birds with one stone and look at CMS as a technology. This will help toward my digital media project aswell as it will count towards my research.

My original idea for this presentation involves comparing two CMS systems I have already come across which are as follows:



CMS Made Simple





Joomla

IAD: How the web helps with publication

This weeks lecture was taken by Rob Stephens because Chris has had an accident on his boat.. speedy recovery Chris!

He spoke to us about how the web can be used to make publication alot easier such as sites such as Amazon. Amazon found that they made most of their money with their long tail inventory because users/customers found it easier to find specific books online. As it would take them alot longer to find a specific book in a Waterstone shop, because there are thousands and thousands of books to look through, where as online they could simply search the book and find it instantly or at least a lot faster.



Attention economy/scarcity:
Attention is the key scarcity factor
Distrubution is given - attention is not
All media fights fot attention and the users time.

The moer information on the web the harder it is to search for it meaning the search engines have to improve all the time and become more sophisticated and become more effective.

Google is the best search engine for finding things.

There are different classes of search:

Sample search
Existing search
Exhaustive search - everything that contains 'x' ... this can't be done it cannot find orphan pages, and the minority of the web is indexed.
Some sites have a no robot tag, aswell as google lock outs, wehre publicers think google are making money out of their content so they block the search engines out.



Rob Stephens- Blog

IAD: Presentation

Last weeks presentations went very well, I think everyone produced a good presentation and covered some interesting points on their different sections..

I will be uploading my power point presentation on this blog... watch this space

DMP: Current Progress

So im starting to put a few bits and bobs onto my blogs now so I can share with others what progress ive made and try and get some feedback of peers so please feel free to comment on anything!!

Here is my power point prototype version 1!!

Im now starting to look into more detail what the users will need to update and trying to design a user friendly form for this.

IAD: Womens Football Coverage.. can this hinder or promote?

The topic I am studying is sport websites.

Initially I was going to look at different sport websites and compare two, and comparing a site dedicated to sport only and a site that has an area of the main website dedicated to sport.

However after looking through sports websites I then decided to categorise my evaulation and make it football specific. This then initiated my second and current idea....

WOMENS FOOTBALL V MENS FOOTBALL

Having played womens football for the majority of my life, I would be very interested in looking into how the coverage for both Womens and Mens football differs and whether one is more dominating than the other.

Mens football is definately much more popular in the UK and this is obvious simply by looking at the difference in wages between a professional male footballer against the wages of a professional female footballer.. ALOT!!

Over the next week I will be looking at this in more details and will report on my findings in the next blog....





Sites that may be of help..
http://www.fgmag.com/ - dedicated to womens football
http://www.footballresults.org/ - dedicated to football results in all competitions... accept the womens??

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/default.stm - Covers all football..
but only has a small area for womens football


Questions to look at:
Does this hinder the future of womens football?
Will promoting womens football online help the game improve?
Does this differ in the USA with soccer?

IAD: Linked data

http://www.linkedata.org/ - image of some linked data, although the image is rather confusing as you cant really work out what each bubble represents, or whether the size of the arrow has a particular meaning.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow:

* Use URIs as names for things

* Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

* When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)

* Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

Simple. In fact, though, a surprising amount of data isn't linked in 2006, because of problems with one or more of the steps. This article discusses solutions to these problems, details of implementation, and factors affecting choices about how you publish your data

IAD: RSS on this blog

I have now added to RSS feeds on to my blog, the first one being my blog for my WDP project.
Second is Chris Wallace's blog the tutor for this module.

DMP: Current CMS

Well my cms progress appears to be abit scattered at the moment as theres so much to do im trying to work out what bit to start first, where most of the time and effort is going to be needed and get some structure to my to do list!

This week ive mainly looked a bit at every different section rather than starting at each so I have a rough idea what I need to for each section.

The visual design im not too worried about so I havent looked much into this as I feel this is one of my strong points and wont take as much self learning or time!!

The UCD - I have started to put together a prototype, I've made it on powerpoint as its easy to make a button hyperlink to another slide and you can present the interactivity between the user and the site easily. I will put this online soon and provide the blog with a link. When making this prototype the first thing I realised was the CMS is going to run on the private side of the site however there is also a public side of the site that will also need to be designed and looked at in detail.. I have decided to leave this section until the end of project as my main scope and personal aim is to get the cms side of the site working as this is what I will be marked on and what will take the most time, so I will use image and text holders for the public page until everything else is complete and then if there is time left over or after the project I will work on this.


Technical side -

How do I get started.. what template to use??

I have decided to use the same template I have used in many php project because I am familiar with the layout and how to set about working around it.
Therefore I have used the same template I used last year in many projects and you can see this here. This is currently where I am playing around with code and trying to get the basics going such as search bar, list of companies once added to the database etc.



Generally -

In general I am happy with the progress although I feel it needs more structure such as a to do list.

step 1. this
step 2. this etc.

I will be working more on this tommorrow where I am going to look at the list of objectives where I want to be at the end of november and set up a monthly plan so I can get cracking!!

I am also going to be setting a time at the end of each week where I will be writing up on the report this way I shouldn't get too carried away with the designing!!

IAD - WEEK 3.. presentation preparation

When I initially searched for sport latest news, most of the results were sub pages on main websites such as:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport
http://www.skysports.com/
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/latest/

There weren’t really many sites that were simply dedicated to sport but more so websites that had covered sport as a sub section to the website.
I made many different searches such as sport dedicated websites, latest sport news etc.

Top of every search was the BBC website which is also a personal favourite and when I’m looking for latest sport, particularly football I’ll log on to BBC.


The other website I found that was dedicated simply to sport and didn’t just have sport as a section of a larger site was Sporting Life.
I have decided to compare these two and look at the good and bad areas of both websites.

IAD: Web Application tools: presentation

Browser Shots
For my web application tool presentation, I spoke about browser shots, which is an application tool that allows you to enter a domain and the application will then send of the domain to many virtual computers and return screen shots for the domain in many different browser, and operating systems.

There are some limitations to this application as it isnt instant, and can take some time to return results. It also doesnt allow you to look at the browser interaction and how that varies in different browsers.

However in general this is a very good tool as you can see quickly how your site will look on many different browsers, including whether flash is enabled, java enabled etc.
Browser shots also looks at the file size of the page and the dimensions which can also be very useful.

IAD: Web Application tools

I looked at website I have recently made and used the evaluation tools below to look at what errors occur here are my findings:

http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.andbuilders.co.uk
When I enterred andbuilders site into the wave accessibility tool it came up with a few errors, mainly that there is javascript and flash present and this could be unaccessable to certain users.

I also looked at what the website looks like in different types of browsers by using browershots.org which takes screenshots of your website in many different browsers you can quickly see the differences, if any in different browsers.
http://browsershots.org/http://andbuilders.co.uk/

IP look ups, for this section I looked at dnsstuff.com and entered ANDbuilders.co.uk again and it came up with all the domain details including when it was registered, when it is up for renewal the name it is registered under and the address, this could be really helpful for someone that wanted a particular domain and wanted to know when it was up for renewal again or to contact the current owner.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois/?tool_id=66&token=&toolhandler_redirect=0&ip=www.andbuilders.co.uk

Link Valet : A very useful site that looks at the website and all the listed links on a website, which it then checks to make sure they are active and not a broken link.
http://valet.webthing.com/link/link.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.andbuilders.co.uk&date=2001-01-01&type=Full&depth=1


http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

The above website requires you to enter the domain and then returns how fast it takes to downloads pages, images, links etc. This is very helpful as a webdesigner as it helps to understand why some pages may not be viewed as much if there are aspects that are taking too long to download.



I enjoyed looking at the different evaluation techniques and will definately continue to use a few of these when developing future websites.

DMP: WEEK 1

Today I have started my blog for year 3 project which I have chosen to build a simple CMS for a building estate website. The CMS will be a big learning curve for me and I feel it will help develop my back end skills, such as PHP, MySql etc.

My cms will be for a building estate which has 20+ companies on them and I will use Dawkins Estate for my project as I have already been approached by one of the companies to try and create this idea. The site will allow the companies to communicate with each other on the website upload their business details and let everybody know what they can do for each other and improve networking on the estate. It will also give security/police the ability to post private messages to all companies on any recent crime or suspicious activities happening in the local area.

To do this I will need to have a user log in area and on here the companies admin can upload recent new etc, photo's if needed or message other companies.