Assessment #2

Since the assessment for week 7 that I posted to my blog on the 23rd of April I have been working on my sites every few days. I’m going to miss posting to them; every time I find something of interest or think of something to look up on the net, my first thought is that I can use whatever it is for MPI104!

Summarising the work completed since the 23rd of April:
- My blog has increased by 25 postings, taking the total to 47.
- My my Delicious account has increased by 36 to a total of 56 bookmarks, spread over 12 bundles.
- My Fickr account had 79 photos, then when it reached the maximum of (free account) 200 images, I had to delete a lot make way for new ones, taking its current total to 159 images which have been organized into 3 sets.

Functionally, changes to my blog include an updated sidebar that includes links to fellow MPI104-2007 students in Friends (most if not all); and a Favourite’s link. The site counter has been changed to enable me to access site statistics (details).

From an aesthetic perspective I did try other templates (see here) and alterations to my current template but found that the one I’m using is still the most aesthetically pleasing to me. I did, however, rearrange the sidebar contents into a more logical format, with Blog Archive at the top, instead of Friends, which has now moved to the bottom of the sidebar. I would like to be able to make the Friends section into a scrollable window, to reduce the physical size it takes up on the blog page, but am unable to work out how through “Customise” and I don’t know enough HTML to do it myself. I also added the RSS feed for my Delicious site.

Some of my more interesting links include a Those were the Days story in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3; a Mature Age rant; and a look at Sadomasochism.

Still interesting, but on a lighter note (pun unintended) there are the posts featuring The Piano Juggler; Phil Collins and a familiar tune by Queen.

Delicious appears to have no capabilities for improving your sites' aesthetics, except through function. By this I mean that by bundling tags and then collapsing their categories, the site is visually tidier.

The same can be done with “Your Network” and “Your Fans”, all of which I’ve done.


I’m unable to work out how to clear “Links saved for you by other people” – I tried saving all of them and then deleting the ones I didn’t want from my bookmarks, but they still appear on the save for you page, stopping me from ‘tidying up’ this page. The Subscriptions page can be neatened by creating labels for types of Subscriptions and grouping them appropriately.


I believe my Delicious account meets the 'interestingness' criteria because of the breadth of websites that are bookmarked: comedy, sculpture, tutorials that can help me in my studies, research that has enabled me to integrate Delicious into my workflow. Additionally I have 1 of a kind bookmarks such as Joseph Merrick, jewellery making and The Eagles.

Flickr has provided me with a challenge of sorts; by uploading images for my GRP224-2007 workflow (which I initially perceived to be a good thing) I discovered that the maximum number of photos for a free account is 200, leaving me with the decision as to which photos could be deleted over which ones I really wanted to keep. My current total of 159 images has been put into 3 sets (General and downloaded, Craft and Uni related), facilitating searches. My current uni courses GRP224-2007 and MPI104-2007 both have images uploaded to Flickr as part of them.

Aesthetically I chose to have the sets present in the home page,


rather than have all small images, which I used when working on the site earlier.


My Flickr interestingness is due to the same eclecticism that is present in my Blog and Delicious sites. I have images of my crafts which I feel are interesting to other like-minded crafters. A comparison of the student-rated aesthetically pleasing Technorati top 100 is of interest to members of MPI104-2007. I have design-related images, images of contemporary musicians, animals and images that are simply pleasing.

While I don't believe that I know the full potential of these sites, I've enjoyed discovering their applicability, and time permitting, will continue to use them, especially Delicious whose usability potential for students is astounding.

Changes to site

No matter how many time I go into customise to change elements of my blog, I still come back to what I currently have. The current blog does have changes made to it from when I first set it up, but none since the first assessment.






None are as aesthetically pleasing to me (without masses of fiddling around) as the blog is now, although I did go in and change fonts and colours, without any aesthetic improvement.

Blog visitors

As I mentioned in this post I didn't realise the counter I'd been using since the middle of the first part of the semester was as useful as tits on a bull. I therefore don't have many statistics to report from Sitemeter, which I joined on the 28th of May.
What I do have is as follows:



Further than this, my visitors have been primarily from Australia, with 9 from the US, 1 from Canada, 2 from Germany, while Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Italy and the Philipines all provided me with 1 visitor apiece. Quite an ecelectic bunch, or is this range of country of origins normal?

Visitors found their way into my site primarily from my home page. Other entries were for the entry on penis splitting (3), Firefox (5), counter (3) and aesthetics (1).

The longest visit was for 144:32 and the second longest for 52:17, and they were both me, I know this because I am online with my blog at the moment, coinciding the the longest visit (oh, and I can see at the "who's on your site page"). 20 of the 36 visits timed in at 00:00.....

Disapointing, I'm glad I'm not using my blog for business purposes, as so many of the blogs I looked at from the Technorati top 100 list were.

Metablog favourite

I thought I'd save whoever is marking my work a bit of time by including an image showing that the ba-ma metablog is a favourite on my Technorati account as well as provide a link to it.

Firefox

Joh,
to continue with my metablog comment; my problem with Firefox is that it doesn't load well at CSU. I'm computer-less at home at the moment, so I have no alternative but to use the Jack Cross computers. I tried loading the sites that we are working within with the following results, all within a 5 minute timeframe:

Blogger with Firefox
Blogger with Safari
Flickr with Firefox
Flickr with Safari
Delicious with Firefox
Delicious with Safari

I have also had similar problems in the VPA labs. With the above dificulties, I can't check my sites in Firefox, so I've done my best in Safari.

Thanks
Bonnie

DPI

With a background in the printing industry and a future in the graphic design industry I've decided to try and work out the difference between DPI, PPI and what I used to know as "screen ruling" - LPI.

I know that DPI refers to dots per inch and the greater the number of dots, the finer the detail will be. But how does this relate to the physical size of an image? Wikipedia states that inkjet printers (the most common type of personal and small business printer) are mostly capable of up to 360 DPI.

PPI stands for pixels per inch and refers to the measurement of a video display, but is more commonly called DPI.

"The DPI measurement of a printer often needs to be considerably higher than the pixels per inch (PPI) measurement of a video display in order to produce similar-quality output. This is due to the limited range of colours for each dot typically available on a printer." Because of the differences in the RGB colour system of a monitor which can produce 16,777,216 colours and CMYK system of a printer which can produce 8 colours (CMYK, brown [c+y+m], blue, green and red); "most printers must therefore produce additional colours through a halftone or dithering process". (DPI is also used incorrectly when examining the scanning process. About.com and Wikipedia refer to the accurate measurement as SPI - samples per inch, but i'm not considering that here.)

LPI refers to lines per inch and measures the number of lines in a halftone grid. The higher the LPI, the better the image quality. Newspapers used to be 85 LPI, standard quality colour printing was 150 LPI.

The closest information I could find regarding the relationship of DPI and LPI was from My Design Primer "A bitmap image's resolution should be twice the linescreen." For example, "a color magazine would require an image be 300dpi for best reproduction at 150lpi." Desk Top Publishing has a chart to get an idea of the typical LPI needed based on method of printing and type of paper.

All in all, a very unsatisfactory investigation, I really needed someone with me who could explain in person, but at least I've bookmarked some sites that can help me to sort out individual scenarios when i come across them.