And So It Was Over (Project A Rationale)

As soon as I saw 'writing' as a medium suggestion for the online exhibition option in Project A, I knew that was what I wanted to involve myself in. As part of the internet fanfiction generation, I considered myself quite well exposed to the position of writing on the online landscape. The process that was to follow in doing the assessment, in typical me-style, was to be long winded, constantly changing, and, as I discovered, ambitious.

I considered my options. I wanted to have a website where users could upload their own pieces, like a sort of writing community, and they were catgeorised by author, genre, tags and a number of other things to make the whole process of searching for a good story to read a lot easier. The problem? This wasn't exactly networking, and wasn't enough of an exhibition. It would be more of a community, and it would be far too difficult to maintain in the real world.

I went back to the drawing board, and thought about the things we had discussed in tutorials and learnt about in lectures; I thought about how Networked Media was allowing the world all over to be connected in several ways. Obviously, APIs came to mind, and the way that several websites, such as Flickr and Twitter, could be utilised on other, unaffiliated websites.

Still determined to keep my passion for writing involved, I knew it would be necessary to somehow incorporate an API into an exhibition. This would allow my exhibition to have live connectivity to other sources, and provide a wide range of exhibits. The only problem, then, was trying to think of what writing exactly I wanted to exhibit. I needed something that could be accessed via an API, and this usually required pieces of writing short in length, for example. I couldn't exactly have 5000 word stories accessed via live feeds.

I thought about Twitter, and the 'new age' of live feeds and how we wanted everything, right now; I thought of the death of the print media that came up in our very first lecture, and how relevant that was to us media students studying this subject. I thought about how some people used Twitter as a tool to get themselves on a public medium - and I knew I wanted to use this as part of my networking.

During my time of random internet searches, kooky little trends on Twitter and awareness of writing forms, I had come across Ernest Hemingway's six word story - a story he wrote in response to a challenge with colleagues. Hemingway bet $10 that he could write a complete story using only six words, and succeeded, with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." What was all too convenient about this revolutionary story was that it has become an internet sensation, inspiring people everywhere to come up with their own six word stories. What was even more convenient was the fact that the concept existed on Twitter, as a hashtag trend; people across the globe would share their six word stories using the trend, thus classifying their work and tagging all six word stories together collectively.

I began to research how to display Twitter live feeds, specifically #sixwordstories trends, via a HTML code. This was the frustrating part of the technical process. However, with the help of our lecturer Michael, it became apparent that Twitter itself can help with this process. On the website there is the option for Twitter 'widgets' - little boxes that you can install via your HTML code that automatically loop status updates on Twitter that are relevant to your search. I went with this option, creating myself four Twitter widgets as the six word story has a number of tags available. It is a stark contrast to what we typically consider literature; Hemingway stretched the boundaries initially by writing a story with only six words, but now the internet has allowed any writer to become published, with six words as well.

I continued my research into the project. I didn't feel like Twitter live feeds were enough; I wanted another platform where a six word story-related API was available. I wanted my exhibition to really explore representation of Hemingway's interesting form. This is where I found SixWordStories.net. This website is similar, in theory, to mine - a public exhibition of six word stories. The only difference is that instead of connecting to other exhibitions of the story form, it relies on submissions by visitors, which are moderated and uploaded accordingly. While although mine doesn't take submissions, it is more a physical exploration of what Hemingway's story has become. It combines the fears and concerns of the internet as a publishing medium with something that was once deemed "classic literature", and has now been possibly exploited.

My website is also a more apt exhibition of the form, as it spans across three other websites: Twitter and SixWordStories.net, as mentioned, as well as Flickr. It is not a specific focus of my project, but I included a Flickr exhibition of six word stories in the photography medium to show how Hemingway's story had been furthered. My priority was to get the written format feeds working correctly, so the Flickr feed at present is a little unrefined.

In terms of design patterns, I divided my exhibition into several pages to make a more extensive website. The home page provides a written background, which encourages viewers to forage more deeply and onto the other pages. If everything had been placed on one page, I feel it would have looked too busy, and not encouraged people to look around. As I had live feeds sourcing from different places, I felt it necessary to separate them out and provide a little written background on each. The logo at the top of the page is quite typical to design patterns, also, as it is clickable and will take the viewer back to the home page.

I also created two "Related" pages, for the enthusiastic viewer. I hoped to create a much broader view of Hemingway's story adaptation rather than simply leave it as a couple of live feeds. It also provides a different sort of networking to the internet, so that my website relates to similar projects on other platforms.

In creating this website I decided upon webs.com as a hosting server, as it allowed me to build my CSS and HTML directly rather than strictly using ugly, website-provided templates. I believe my website is something a little different, as the Twitter and SWS.net examples I have referenced as influences are much more specific. Hopefully my website is a thorough exhibition, giving a wide variety of examples for such a specific subject.

See it for yourself at The Literal Error, a true exhibition of what was once a classic. As my previous blog explains, I chose to name, as when searching for 'typo' in a thesaurus I discovered that it is simply a synonym for 'literal error'. I thought this was rather fitting.

The literal error

This week's lecture I found really interesting. Probably because it was full of not technological jargon and complicated coding but instead more philosophical and conceptual ideas.

When you think about it, technology is almost infinite; it is something that is constantly expanding. At the moment, when I hear 'technology', I think of an iPhone. But in a few month's time, will it be iPad? (It's also interesting how Apple are almost a figurehead for notions of anything 'technology' nowadays. You think technology and see that little 'i'.)

Technology is like another world. Especially with the internet. This place with so much information... and its own set of rules - "affordances and limitations". However, like Michael said, the limitations of the internet are constantly changing. Who knows, maybe a few years from now it'll become a way of transporting physical things, like teleportation. That probably won't ever happen because we'll want to eat food digitally instead rather than buy it from Woolworths Online and have it appear through our laptops. But anyway. Because affordances and limitations are constantly changing we need to be able to adapt, and in turn that means that design conventions for example with change. In an example more relevant to us, how we make media: this could change. How we show it, too, will change. How it affects the audience. And so on.

The design conventions of a website seemed so relevant, too, especially seeing as that's what we're handing in this week. And when I thought about the websites I frequent most, it was easy to see why those conventions worked.

Speaking of our websites... mine's alright. I mean, it's still a massive work in progress. It took a little while, but I found/decoded the URL for the Twitter API I'm hoping to incorporate into my project. The problem is trying to format it into my page so that there's a little box with a nice little live feed making many happies. I bet it's really simple but I'm doing this in typical style by over complicating it and missing the point.

Basically my exhibition is writing - The Six Word Story. Ernest Hemingway once claimed that he could write a story in six words; and, sure enough, he did: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn". I think it's a little, for want of a better word, wankerish, to assume it's amazing and everything, but I've found it interesting enough to exhibit it.

You see, the six word story has become a trend. Literally, on Twitter (#sixwordstory or #6wordstory). Twitter has become the perfect form for people to post their own six word stories, probably because the character limit allows not much else aside from incoherent babble, and they can show it to the world. Mind you, there are some pretty poor stories on the trend, with some people using any trend available on Twitter possible to advertise, themselves or otherwise.

But this is all part of my project. In the very first lecture the death of the print media was brought up; now with the internet, people can essentially do whatever the hell they want. Exploit the six word story, use it, appreciate it. Most do the first, in my very humble opinion, but I'm no critic. So I guess my exhibition... well, exhibits that very thing.

Along with general background and such to give a background to the Twitter thing(s), I'm hoping to link in some journals and communities I found on LiveJournal.com, all dedicated to producing six word stories. Have they exploited the art form? What defines a good six word story? To me most of the ones I've been coming across are pretty poor. But maybe I just don't understand it.

I've also found a group on Flickr that is dedicated to photos depicting their very own six word stories, as decided by the photographer. I've worked out how to use Flickr APIs, so hopefully I can add this in too. But really it'll just be something extra I'll add in because my exhibition's more on the writing part. The Flickr group will be good to show how the story form has spread, I guess. Maybe I'll find some weird Youtube videos called "My Six Word Story" and people read them out. That would be epic.

At this stage my project's called The Literal Error, which is apparently a synonym for typo. Rather fitting.

Also, I looked up the trailer for The Runaways because I like romanticised retellings of musicians.

Frigging Kristen Stewart.

You just got week fived

I don't like the word reflection. Just saying. It's almost as bad as "journey".

I think by this stage I've gotten the basics of HTML and CSS downpat. That said, I'm still not very confident with it, and building pages from scratch is a bitch. So. While although I think I've got it, I also think I'm a massive beginner which depresses me. I think it's necessary to put a little more effort into learning it than I have, I guess. I know that semantic markup is the name given to the code that describes the information you're putting on your page in elements - so rather than having to put bold tags throughout your page to make headings bold, you can make it so all headings of a certain type are bold. It also makes readability more possible - think of the word "semantics"... different words have different meaning for you. You want tags that make more sense. For example is less logical than , with the em standing for emphasis. And and so on.

I've never been good at explaining things so this is hard. But I understand what it means. I guess I'll steal this website's example, which was very helpful when a few moments ago I tried to explain ~semantic ~markup.

Say you want all of your headings bold. You could go through and put all the necessary headings in b tags. However, as you update the site, you start adding more headings. More b tags. You screw one up here and there and the page looks ridiculous. You constantly have to comb through your code and find the offending tag.

The heading code is very useful for this. It requires CSS. There are a variety of header codes, ranging from h1 to h4 and so on... I think they're automatically bold. With CSS you can also edit the header tag so that the font size is how you like it.

For example
h1 { font-size: 50px; } will make all of your h1 headings 50 pixels in size. And then you can edit the colour and stuff.

Even though it's in the CSS code, you'll still have to put HTML tags in around your headers so the computer knows which text are headers. So if you've put the aforementioned CSS code in using the h1, put and (without the ! marks) around your headings.

What is epic about it is that you can make different headings. h1 could be red and big and h4 on the otherhand could be more like a subheading and blue and small. But either way you're transforming entire elements. Which is nice.

As a result, non semantic markup would do the thing will all the bold codes and have to specify the font size and colour for every heading. Which would be a pain in the ass.

I guess I kind of made that website's example my own, but oh well. I need to credit them anyway. The website also goes into presentational markup, which I now understand, but I won't bother going into it.

I can't really explain what the 'cascading' in Cascading Style Sheet really means. So I'll get the internets to help me.

This website is legendary.

Style Sheets allow style information to be specified from many locations. Multiple (partial) external style sheets can be referenced to reduce redundancy, and both authors as well as readers can specify style preferences. In addition, three main methods can be employed by an author to add style information to HTML documents, and multiple approaches for style control are available in each of these methods. In the end, style can be specified for a single element using any, or all, of these methods. What style is to be used when there is a direct conflict between style specifications for an element?

Cascading comes to the rescue. A document can have styles specified using all of these methods, but all the information will be reduced to a single, cohesive "virtual" Style Sheet. Conflict resolution is based on each style rule having an assigned weight according to its importance in the scheme of things. A rule with a higher overall importance will carry a higher weight. This will be used in place of a competing style rule with a lower weight/importance. A hierarchy of competing styles is thus formed creating a "cascade" of styles according to their assigned weights.

So basically, cascading means the ordering of code based on importance so that stronger code overrides less strong code in order to style something. This is important because there is often conflicting codes when styling elements.

I think. Chances are I got that completely wrong.

Censorship. This is something I feel strongly about. The government's plans to filter the internet are stupid. I first became aware of the topic on a website message board I frequently visit.

I think it's a poor move by the Labour Government for several reasons. The first - it is a typical, vote-grabbing stunt designed to attract parents with the 'somebody think of the children' mantra. The government thinks there is a need for something where there isn't. Yes, there is a lot of inappropriate content on the internet, and yes, children can access it. But it is the parents' responsibility to filter this for their kids. This is where the problem is. It is not the government's responsibility to do so, and it is also nearly impossible for them to do this on a national scale. It is too difficult technically, financially, and morally, when you think about other people's civil liberties, particularly for members of the population that are over 18.

The cost. According to the Australians Against Internet Censorship group on Facebook, initial setup costs are estimated to be around $44 million, with an additional $33 million for every year it runs. The Labour Government has already cost us enough, what with a several billion dollar deficit currently reported, and this is just another useless program designed to attract votes and cost way too much money.

It will slow down the internet. When various filters were tested, internet speeds dropped from 21 to 86%. My internet's slow enough already, thank you very much.

Civil liberties. We pride ourselves on being a free country, where we have freedom of speech and all that stuff that some citizens of the world don't get. In an earlier lecture I remember Michael putting up a list of other countries whose internet is already censored in the same way that our government proposes to. From memory, most were Communist or run by dictators. We are a democratic country and yet our government is impeding on our rights.

How can you define what is appropriate or inappropriate? There are so many boundaries. What age level is the country internet's content appropriate for? How are the lists of illegal content compiled? Who compiles them? Who will maintain the list?

It's a shit idea. Basically Kevin Rudd is a n00b. And Stephen Conroy. And whatever dimwit thought it was a good idea.

CSS (creativity sucking swine)

I'm not that bitter about CSS, I just thought my HTML abbreviation thing was so cool and assumed it would be possible to make another one. But it didn't work.

Coding is frustrating, but I guess oddly rewarding. The thing I find interesting, though, is that we're being creative by using a code, a logic, a set language... it's creating something out of logic. I guess that's not normal for me, and I'm sure Jackson Pollock would be ashamed. I've tried to throw code on a blank TextWrangler thingy with miscellaneous passion and try to reveal my artistic subconscious, just like Pollock, only to come out with a webpage so excessively hideous and wonky that the only thing logical at that point would be to throw the stupid oversized Mac computer screen at the stupid frigging wall.

I guess what I'm trying to say that it's challenging. But isn't it like any other work of art?

This is what I'm thinking. A painting, right? You're mixing colours and trying different paintbrushes but it just won't come out right. So you paint over the top. You mix more colours. You snap your paintbrush in half and shove it down some poor soul's throat but just apologise by saying "I'm an artist, I'm allowed to be violent". In the end you come up with a visual creation, an amalgamation of colours and lines and thought processes that gets put in a wanky art gallery and people get their own meaning.

A webpage might not be conceptual, and instead a little more factual and logical, but if you're trying to make it pretty with CSS you're imporing the aesthetics and making it something that a visitor could appreciate more. At least I am. So in the same way you're mixing paint, trying different colours, and snapping that godawful $30 horsehair paintbrush into tiny little pieces like it deserves, with CSS you are going back and forth, deleting code, looking up a new one and trying it out, and in the end trying to create something distinct, charismatic or easy to understand - it all depends on your website's purpose. The same as an artist is trying to create something specific too.

I don't know, maybe it's some pointless thought from the recesses of an overactive and confusing but not at all original mind, but I find CSS interesting as a result. It's a stylesheet, it is trying to add style to your bland webpage... make it more visually pleasing. (Or maybe visually annoying, depending on how postmodern you are.) So it's sort of a kind of visual art. The weird thing about it, though, is we're using a completely logical (or supposed to be logical, depending on how CSS-savvy you are) code to create it. A lot of art isn't logical. It just comes from somewhere, like the deep crevices of the subconscious for abstract expressionists.

Or maybe CSS isn't an art and art is logical anyway so I should shut up. Either way, CSS is endlessly frustrating but I'm determined to beat it down with my big oversized wooden spoon. Suck it up. My web proposal at this stage looks somewhat average, but just you wait.

HTML (how to make lovely)

"You learn HTML yourself."

Before Myspace was even cool, Neopets was the place to be. And as a kid ranging from ten to twelve years old (I can't remember how old I was when I first joined) Neopets provided a range of opportunities far beyond the simple notion of having an internet creature for a pet. (For the record, Tuskaninnies are my bitch.) I'd barely grasped the notion of the internet yet soon I discovered what HTML really was.

If you wanted a customised shop front, or profile, or message board signature you had to put a code in. It was a weird code, one terribly full of <'s and >'s and /'s and American spelling of "color" and ='s. But if you wanted to look pretty on the Internet, HTML was as good a friend to you as any makeup artist. (For the record #2: Bad analogy.)

It became all too apparent, the endless websites devoted to Neopets Shop Layouts and Neopets Profile Layouts, pages and pages of Neopet HTML buffs creating preset layouts that all you had to do was copy and paste and these lovely people would write "PUT YOUR SHOP DESCRIPTION HERE". It was too easy. Copy, paste, edit, post, edit out the person's credit link so it looked like you made the page. Yes, even as an eleven year old I was a stingy credit taker.

Thing was, I had a hard time finding a layout I liked. People were too crass with colours, and I was an arty elitist eleven year old who thought she knew best. So I decoded the HTML, and, thanks to my computer literate father, began to understand with the aid of a book called HTML For Bitches or something along those lines. Just kidding, the book never had that title.

#000000 meant black and #ffffff meant white and the background colour (or should I say 'color') code became my best friend. I never made my own layouts from scratch, just took a template and did the fine tuning.

And several years later, studying the very subject as part of a degree with eye on a career, I'm doing the same thing. I find myself on Blogger trawling through the endless CSS and experiementing and trialling and erroring, rusty from the year of HSC did to me, limiting my internet and in turn ruining my prodigous scabbing skills in the process.

But it makes me wonder - how many people build it from scratch? Obviously someone has to (or maybe they don't, with the aid of programs that do it for you nowadays) so that internet stinges such as myself can fiddle and tweak and continue to stinge. Since Neopets I have been on a number of sites where building your own profile is recommended (if you want to leave the derelict status of n00b forever), whether it was Myspace (lolwtf?) or a site called Mibba. Unfortunately Facebook forces uniformity upon us. (unless you play FarmVille, then you'll always be a n00b.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that websites are trying to make us do these things, and there'll always be other people who'll make layouts over and over and post them up on a website so we can copy them. I wonder if they realise how their work can be used as a starting point for more HTML/CSS savy users? Who knows. HTML is the recipe for your internet presence - a recipe on how to make lovely.

As I delved into the dark memories of my past for this blog I went back, just out of curiosity, to Neopets...

... they've sold out, man.