Assessment Post #2

Well it's that time again where we must write our assessment post to complete our assignment. This term's work was similar to last term in the sense that we had to keep up our Blog, Flickr and Del.icio.us accounts only this time we had to look more at the aesthetics of what we were doing. With Blogger it is a lot easier then the other two, though Johannes has said that the Flickr aesthetics go also on the images you have uploaded which helps!

I have completed the checklist and am fairly happy as well as proud of the work I have done particularly with the aesthetics of my blog. So here we go with summarising in detail the work I have done this term which will hopefully give me more than a pass again! =)

Again I have attempted to keep up with the required 10 hours a week though I may have slipped some times as I felt this terms work wasn't nearly as interesting nor as structured.

FLICKR - My flickr account

☑ has uploaded at least 30 pictures
☑ has organized pictures into sets or pools
☑ has uploaded screenshots of details of examples of good aesthetics in websites
☑ all pictures have titles AND descriptions
☑ pictures of interest to other students have MPI104-2007 tag
☑ pictures of no interest to other students do not have MPI104-2007 tag
☑ all pictures have tags other than MPI104-2007
☑ user has pushed at least 6 pictures to MPI104-2007 group
☑ user has at least 12 contacts, joined at least 3 groups and nominated at least 6 favorites



I think the first few pages at the moment a quite aesthetically pleasing, with lots of pretty landscapes from where I used to work in the UK, the images I took for VPA104 Assignment 1 as well as my screen shots etc. Page 1 of Flickr account

I have uploaded a lot more than 30 pictures in fact I have uploaded so many images that I ran into the problem that Flickr will only display my most recent 200 images, so any older ones are now hidden.

I re-arranged my sets so that they are now organised into images from Uni, Back home and my trip over to Europe in 2006, which means most photo's I am uploading at the moment fall into one of those categories, though there is the odd exception.

I made sure I went through all my images that I had already tagged with the MPI104-2007 tag and checked whether or not I felt they were related to other students in the class as well as then adding any new ones I felt were worthy of the tag. A lot of them are probably more for people who live on campus or are my friends in the subject but they are of interest to other students within the class.

I've added favourites, joined a few groups and have quite a large contact list. All my photo's a titled, have descriptions, tags - ones that aren't MPI104-2007.

I've made comments on Annies Flickr, Erin's Flickr and Miss Tiz's Flickr as well as a few others.

DELICIOUS - My Del.icio.us account

☑ has saved at least 3 pages of bookmarks
☑ all bookmarks have descriptions
☑ all bookmarks have tags
☑ has bundled all tags
☑ all bookmarks of interest to other students have MPI104-2007 tag
☑ bookmarks of no interest to other students do not have MPI104-2007 tag
☑ has several other delicious users in their network
☑ has saved links for others



Del.icio.us was a lot harder to do anything aesthetically pleasing with then Flickr or Blogger so I changed the view of my bundles to cloud rather than list which I am a lot happier with.

If you view my Del.icio.us account with only 10 items per page then I easily make the 3 pages of bookmark requirement.

All bookmarks have descriptions and tags and when bundling all my tags I ran into the problem that you couldn't bundle tags saved "for:", luckily that day I was reading comments on the Metablog and ran across someone who had already told you about the problem and my mild heart attack stopped as you had changed the checklist to say all tags except those with "for:"!

I scrutinized again as to what was of interest to other students and I think I limited my bookmarks to those that would help with our subjects rather than all the sites I found interesting and hoped other students would too. So those of interest have the MPI104-2007 tag and those that are of no interest don't!

I have most of the Tuesday class in my network which is good I didn't have to do that task and I had already saved links for others such as Matt and Hannah as well as some other students in the class.

Again Del.icio.us is a lot harder to do anything aesthetically with then the others but hopefully my efforts have been enough!

BLOGGER - My Blogger account

☑ has more than the minimum posts
☑ has used working links in all posts
☑ has experimented with templates fonts and colours
☑ has included rss feed of their delicious bookmarks
☑ has a technorati “fave this blog” button on their blog
☑ has nominated ba-ma metablog as a favourite on technorati
☑ has counter (or sitemeter etc button) on their blog
☑ has a blog post about the visitors to their blog

I think in the last class we decided that 14 was the minimum amount of posts for this assignment and luckily I already had like 19 but me being me went out and wrote a few more that are hopefully a lot more interesting then some of them which were for class. Some more interesting ones are Bit of an update, My weekend with mummy!, Full Board Crawl, Centurion - Yaz's 21st and Good aesthetics - changing my layout.

I went through all my post and made sure there were working links in all, which meant going right back to my first couple of posts and rectifying the fact there were no links. Some posts the image is the link as it will take you to my Flickr account as they are post made through Flickr.

As you can see from my blog I went to a fair bit of effort to create a new template - I'm fairly happy with it except for where the header and body join. I spent probably 5 hours attempting to work out how to use HTML etc. and finally did and am super proud of myself! I think the colours are very pretty and reflect my happiness and fun side that I show within my posts. If you read the post Good aesthetics - changing my layout you can see my trial and errors and read all about my efforts to get it where it is now! I am really happy with the aesthetics of my blog, I believe it looks good, is different, fun, visually pleasing, use of function is easy and you can still read the text easily, I also have tried to put my side links in order of importance!

I have a Fave this badge from Technorati (and currently I have an authroity of 16 and a rank of 340,322), I have a RSS feed for Del.icio.us, I have a counter with sitemeter and I have faved the Metablog.

I had previously written a post about counters and visitors but it wasn't specifically aimed at visitors to my blog it was about all my 3 accounts though I do touch on each, and I had only just started using sitemeter then so didn't have much information on my visitors, but I now can see many things from how many people access my blog a day or week, how long they stay and where abouts in the world they are from! You can view my post I made about visitors to all my accounts here, and I hope that it satisfies the checkpoint!

Well thus concludes my final post for this Assessment #2 and hopefully it is sufficient enough for me to do as well again i this assessment as I did in assessment #1! I believe I have achieved an overall good aesthetic look throughout my accounts as well as keeping up with my work being interesting. I have enjoyed this class and have learnt lots of different things to do with the net and forming communities and I am pretty pleased with myself for the effort I have put in and what I have achieved!