This is the end…. A retro- and prospective look on my work

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The day of reckoning stands nigh, a month long battle against creatures made of CSS code and rhetorics is nearly over. A beast of code an speech lays beneath our feet, stomped into submission. In other words: Today is the day we have to deliver our finished product, our website and portfolio, to the exam office and get it graded.

It has been a quick semester for me, filled with both new knowledge and renovations of old. But in the end I think I’ve ended up with something good, something my own, something I couldn’t create without knowing what I know today. I’ve ended up with a website that may seem simple, but is moulded to my own liking and looks unique. In a few minutes I will do my last edit on the site and then leave it up to the powers that be to grant me a good grade (hint hint;)

I will use this last blog post to look back on what I’ve achieved on the site, how it looks now and what could happen with it in the future. Welcome to the epilogue and the prologue of Thomas does IT.

How does it look?

Ever since the beginning of this semester, I’ve wanted to build a website that is easy to the point of minimalistic, intuitive and fast. I decided that I did not need bells and whistles or some fancy theme with animations and so on. Those themes are, in my opinion, hard to maintain and even harder to edit without screwing it all up.

So I used the standard WordPress layout at the time, called TwentyEleven, and removed everything superfluous, leaving only the bare bones structure for me to work on. The header was made entirely black, marking my first change in the style structure of the WordPress site. I then decided that black and white would be my primary colours and made the rest of the background white.

I was told that, perhaps it was a bit boring and therefore experimented with gradient backgrounds, a simple way to create dynamics in a page. I ended up, by mistake, making a gradient black turning white just after the header, blending nicely into it. I liked it since it encapsulated the body of the site and I let it be.

One task was to create social media plugins to tie our sites and portfolios to that part of the Internet. I tried to do this while still keeping up the minimalistic design and ended up using some simple, while still colourful, buttons from Acurax that “popped” out of the background, exposing the social media alien I got living in me, the persona of the site. I also added social media sharing widgets at the top of all posts to encourage sharing, which is the most important feature of Social Media.

Of course these are only the biggest design changes I made to my site, all the rest can be seen in my changelog.

How does it work?

Since I did not use some exorbitant theme, my site works perfectly. Thomas Does IT works like IT should: Fast, intuitive and stable. There was several exercises highlighting our design choices, the structure of the site, and how well it played with the entire experience. One was an information structure analysis, where the site menu was recreated in shuffled post-it notes. These were then put in to order by a different person in the way he saw as the most intuitive way. I passed with nearly flying colours and received some nice tips on what I could do to make it even easier to navigate Thomas Does IT.

Another task was to analyse the visual design and layout of the site. How well it worked with the eye. Again the result was positive. The minimalistic design provided a clean interface which could be navigated around intuitively. There were minor flaws, such as quite small menu text, which I later implemented in my site. No site is ever perfect and therefore the striving towards that point demands constant rethinking.

Of course eloquence is an important part of any written, or spoken, message and a blog is no different. I was very pleased to discover that I was good enough at argumentation that one of my exercise essays was highlighted in class! This must show that I at least understand the basics on how to convey a message. I have, of course, been conscious in how the language of my site affects the visitor. This has been highlighted with the creation of an intro text that give pointers to where a newly arrived, first time, visitor should go to better understand who I am and what I’m writing about.

Lastly, no website is complete without being visible. The saviour is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. A tool that is a must to every web designer, I’ve found out. SEO helps Search engines, the backbones of finding information in today’s Internet, to better index you and assign search terms to your website and posts. I’ve gained, through that lecture, a better understanding of how search engines work and what internet sites must do to gain visibility amongst billions of other like them.

To do that I’ve added a SEO plugin that monitors and modifies my site so as to appear as visible as is possible for a small domain like mine. It analyzes every single post and gives pointers on how optimized it is and what I can do better. It also helps create an interface with the popular search engines and web page indexes of the world, which means that I should now exist on engines like Google, Bing and Alexa.

Does it look good and work well?

In the end it’s up to my teachers, censors and examinators to decide whether I’ve done a good job in this course, but if I should decide for myself, I think I did a good job for a first timer.

This was my first serious attempt at a website. I’ve had a WordPress site with its own domain before but I never got around to do anything with it. This course has given me the opportunity to finally delve into the world of web programming, and writing, to truly get a taste of what it’s like. It has been a great experience and I hope to continue using my site onwards.

The site itself works as it should, all pages and functions are running 5 by 5 and the design is very much like I imagined it. Does that mean it’s perfect? Absolutely not! there are quite possibly numerous bugs and a few that I’ve caught myself. One of them is the gradient background. While it looks great on the front page, it gets askew on any other page and slithers upwards, leaving the gradient to end way higher than it should. Some might call it a feature, like a curtain being pulled up, but it is a bug to me. A bug that, after numerous attempts and a panic attack sadly couldn’t fix.

Another fault on my site lies with the Facebook Share plugin. If you click on it it likes like it should, but the box that appears to let you modify the like text gets cut off and is unusable. It is an inexcusable bug that, sadly, I cannot fix either. I have tried everything in my power but due to the aforementioned time frame it was not possible to fix in time. But it does work.

In conclusion, I think I’ve created a smart little site which is easy to use and still doesn’t look too much like it just used a template. The navigation is flawless and all ground functions work like they should. Looking back, it has been a long ride. One with a lot of baby steps and some milesteps that all lead up to a site that I can call my own. A site that shows Thomas Does IT and it.

Thank you for reading, merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Thomas Bo Nielsen 17-12-2012

IMC (BIMK) Project: A retrospective

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At the 12. of December 2012, A group consisting of three tired students, and one snoring

It may not be an exam in the traditional sense but it's still stressful.

It may not be an exam in the traditional sense but it’s still stressful.

contentedly at home, delivered the first of many exam projects, here in the course of Introduction to Media and Communication AKA IMC or BIMK. As it was a lengthy process (and an important one too), I think it’s prudent to at least write a few words about it.

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Excercises for DPW (FPW) lecture week 48 Monday – Design Analysis

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This week’s exercises were about, as the title suggests, analysing the design of our websites, namely the visual design. This is done with a classmate who analyses elements of your website design while you yourself take notes.

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Project 3: Chindōgu

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This objective of this project was to create a Chindōgu invention and make a sales pitch for it in the form of a magazine front page.

What is Chindōgu?

First of all I would like to explain a bit about what Chindōgu means and what it stands for. According to Wikipedia, chindōgu is the art of solving everyday problems through obvious solutions that would, if used in real life, either create “many new problems” or cause the user to be shunned by their surroundings. Litterally translated from japanese it means  “unusual tools” and it was created by inventor and editor Kenji Kawakami.

Discovering an idea

Part of a lecture on creativity also touched on the subject of creating ideas then brainstorming, focusing and boiling them down to leave a finished invention in the end. Therefore I’d really like to say that I spent hours thinking and dozens of post-it notes to formulate an idea, but that’s simply not true in this case.

What actually happened was that I sat in the campus café, having just bought a cup of tea. When the hot liquid touched my lips it, obviously, burned like hell. I then thought: why do hot beverages always have to be scalding? Wouldn’t it be nice if it was possible to quickly cool ‘em down? The metaphorical light bulb lit up in my head and I hurried home to think up some kind of way to, in the spirit of Chindōgu, cool liquids quickly and with a degree of silliness.

I came home, mouth still tinkling after the barrage of hot water, and immediately began turned on the cooker. Steam rose from a tea cup minutes later and I breathed it in, nose draft creating turbulence in the hot air. At that moment I had another epiphany: You always blow on hot beverages! This process is tiring, it is time consuming and takes attention away from anything else you were doing. What if you could make another blow on it?

I quickly threw away the idea of a paper fan, it was too ordinary. Too boring. Instead I rummaged around my family’s tool shed for an older summer companion: The electric fan. It was almost pure genius, have an electric fan blow the burning surface and quickly finish your tea, a must in this fast society of ours. I plugged it in, turned it on and…

My invention: The hot beverage cooling machine

Yes! surface steam dissipated as if some heavenly mouth was gently blowing it away. My invention was born. You might be able to visualize for yourself this, very simple, invention but for us unimaginative I created this picture:

Not anymore it doesn't!
Not anymore it doesn’t!

As you can see, the composition is very simple. An electric fan blows on the surface of a mug or cup (not included) and cools it by desaturating the steam above the surface.

Of course the idea’s only part of an invention; I needed a name. For this I used an idea from the creativity lecture. I took a bunch of post-it notes and wrote words connected with the idea (like coffee, tea, beverage, hot, cold, breezy, fan etc.) down on them. Then I mixed and matched them with each other to see if I could come up with a nice name for my groundbreaking invention. Sadly this process is not pictured as I forgot to take photos while doing it. My bad.

In the end I came up with the name “Cool Coffee” for the system. It sounded nice and immediately described the use and effect of it. You don’t want to receive cold coffee but dammit if you don’t want it cooled before you chug it down!

And that’s my idea. I think I did fulfill the objectives required of the Chindōgu tenets. It is, after all, a useful invention for an everyday problem which, if used, would create further problems from the users and heap scorn from the surrounding society. But for the teacher’s sake let’s make sure. The tenets used here are the teacher’s requirements and may therefore differ from the “original”.

1.Må ikke have nogen real-nytte
  • The device, of course, does not have any real use in everyday life. No one in their right mind would carry around a fan without feeling really stupid. Especially if all they would get out of it would be a slightly faster cooled coffee. And that’s without mentioning all the people who would laugh at you for it. of course there’s the technical grievances of having a fan cooling your coffee, some people do like it hot.
2.Skal bygges
  • The device is certaintly buildable, as the picture clearly shows. You can even use one of those cheap, portable fans for easier use.
3.Skal indeholde anarki
  • I do not understand this point, sadly. Anarchy might not be what this invention contains most of, but I gues you do break rules by using it. At least you don’t conform to laws of common decency.
4.Skal kunne bruges I hverdagen
  • This tool is definetly usable in the real life. I mean, so many of us buys hot beverages every single day.
5.Må ikke have nogen salgsværdi/kunne sælges
  • I have no idea who would use this device, much less buy it. This,I guess, means that it fulfills this point
6.Humoren må ikke være det bærende element
  • I actually didn’t make this as a humoristic or satirical statement (although you could make some kind of analysis that this shows the laziness of the modern society) but, as you can read above, as a reaction to a too hot cup of tea.
7.Må ikke være propagandistisk
  • As with the above tenet, there is no consciously inlaid propaganda in this invention
8.Må ikke omhandle tabu-emner
  • Everyone complains when they burn their tongues and everybody complains when it happens. In my opinion this does not make it a taboo subject
9.Må ikke kunne patenteres
  • I would rather not invest in a patent on this idea because OBH-NORDICA, the makers of the electric fan used, would immediately see lawsuits. Also, since there is no discerning difference in the electric fan used and other, “normal” electric fans, there probably wouldn’t be any grounds to patent it.
10.Må ikke være fordømmende
  • This is very much the same rule as the taboo, propagandic and humoristic ones. Therefore I will say it again: There was no conscious decision to, in any way, do anything but solve the common problem of too hot liquid.

The media exposure

Lastly, we were tasked with creating a front page for the product, produced by the creators of our invention. A link to a website with a tool for this purpose was given and is what I used. The end result looks like this:

Now what did I learn from this? Well, I did get extremely lucky this time around and immediately got an idea for an invention. This means that there wasn’t any real brainstorming in this part. I did make use of brainstorming through post-it notes when coming up with the names and this hybrid of two methods helped me get through a slump.

Furthermore, I did use the analogy of a person blowing on a cup of tea to come up with the idea of using a machine, namely the electric fan, to do the same this for us. This was also a method used in class.

I did this excercise completely alone, mostly because I came up with the idea completely by accident. Of course there might have been more focus on the processes within the tasks if there was a group working on it but I don’t think it would have turned out quite so good.

Last but not least, was this a stressful task? Definetly not. The process of coming up with an invention was very easy for me and, because of the time restraints of almost a week, didn’t demand that much attention.

Thomas Bo Nielsen 11-11-2012

Project 2: Elevator Speech

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This little project was a test on rhetorical skills through a very short speech of about 30 seconds (approximately the time it takes to ride the elevator. The objective is to take a subject/problem and then tell how you can help with a solution.

I chose to cover how web culture is, especially in big media, often wrongly analyzed, i.e. how the “hacker group” Anonymous is referred to as a solid group instead of a literally anonymous cluster with very little knowledge and connection to each other. Or how torrent files are usually used for digital piracy instead of acknowledging its beneficial work. I won’t go into any answers to these questions, mostly because of time and because that wasn’t the point.

But what alternative do I present? Instead of being a journalist detached from the more dynamic internet culture I have observed, if not participated, in several groupings that create the biggest waves in the world. I’m part of the Internet generation.

The short film was recorded in my bedroom with an HD recorder and a Tripod. The raw film is supposedly 1080P (that’s HD quality for the uninitiated) but I’m pretty sure Youtube downgraded the quality quite a bit. I still have the raw recording (including fumbled takes) on file.

Show the Youtube video

Am I satisfied with the video? No. Definitely not. I have never had the ability to utter scripted lines in front of a camera and that makes it look like I’m looking into a script while in reality I’m trying not to simply stand stiffly and stare holes in the camera.

I have never edited a video before and only have access to the default Windows editor and Youtube’s built-in editor (which is used here), this makes the video very raw and the text was the only available kind.

Lastly the time restraints were very harsh. Understandable but harsh. It was next to impossible to incorporate both a subject and an argument to why I would be able to answer the questions to that subject. This means that I only tangent on why I would be able to e.g. provide a better coverage of Internet culture.

Did I learn something from it? Of course. This was my first time filming, acting and editing a video myself. I learned that, to act even remotely believable it can take a lot of wrong takes and fumbling of lines before “it’s a wrap”. This means that I also learned how important it is to learn your lines and to say them with conviction (and without looking into script or into the air).

Thomas Bo Nielsen 28-10-2012