week 12

This was the final lecture in our publishing and creating digital media class. For this class we went over additional services we could use in publishing.

We first talked about epub, Epub is a popular open source format for electronic book publication, an epub book is zip folder that containing other files. these files are what would be contained in the book like the images, the fonts and the contents. It is done in this way as so it can be read on most opensource e-readers like a KOBO. An Ebook is very much like a website as it would be written through html, the tags in the code format the book by making paragraphs and headings.

We talked about software that helps us do this, the list of software being

• Sigil
• Code academy(which we had talked about previously in the course)
• Ibooks
• Calibre

All this software help people to format there e books correctly.

We then went had a final look at WordPress and other tools that it provides, we talked about how it is a free cloud based blog host and that there is free self hosted CMS for when you want full control of your websites.

For our lab we had to make sure our portfolio of images were on there own page and that they’re all in some form of slideshow.

we also had to make sure that our portfolio was fully completed and that we had 12 posts about our time in the class and that we had separate pages for our different project tasks. we also had to make sure any images we used were properly cited.

citations
image 1
thedigitalreader.com

Week 11

In this week we continued on the discussion of promotion and this week we started to talk about the use of social media tools to optimize your website.

We went over many popular social websites such as Facebook and Twitter, these sites are good as they provide a good way of engaging withe the fans of the website and they can then use Facebook and twitter to share new post in their website so followers will know when new posts are made. And the likes and re-tweets that these posts receive lead to higher circulation, news sites have started to use this quite effectively by posting links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and using the headline to grab the persons attention so they will click on the link to read more.

This can be also be seen as clickbaiting, where sites such as Buzzfeed and the Huffington post would have highly sensational titles in order for people to click into them and drive up their ad revenue, here is a video which gives this a humorous explanation on how it is done.

For this weeks task we had to use one of the widgets in order to create a Facebook like box.

Citations
image 1
markdubois.com
image 2
businessintheblack.com

video
youtube.com/epicnew(withpeterandchris)

Week 10

This week we talked about SEO(Search Engine Optimisation).

What SEO does is it improves a websites visibility in search engine results buy altering the the layout of the website or altering the language in the website.

HTML meta tags allows you to highlight key areas of your page. Search use a ranking system whereby websites are indexed by their use of keywords and search terms, so if a website is highlighted better than others it would appear higher up in the search engine ranks. Here is a tutorial video on how meta tagging works.

we then talked about organic SEO, what organic SEO means is all the unpaid ways of getting traffic towards your website, these would include social media campaigns which is what many websites do these days buy having a popular Facebook page and having links on the page that would go through to the website rather than showing the content straight away. But there is also paid ways of having the same effect, these include click for pay programs. Many twitter pages and Facebook can buy followers buy using clickfarms which means ghost accounts are then set up in order to follow the page.

text farm Bangladesh

 

This video explains how it works and how Facebook could be doing it themselves.

 

 

citations
image 1
ranko1.co.uk
image 2
daserste.de

video 1
youtube.com/internationalcaller
video 2
youtube.com/veritasium

week 9

For this lecture we talked about the concept of copyright, we were told that copyirght is a legal concept that is inforced by the governments which gives the creator of an original piece of work exclusive rights to it.

What copyright basically does is gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work meaning that the creator has intellectual property over thier work.

we then went on to discuss the issue of underlying and derivative works, a derivative work is expressive creation that has major copyrighted elements to it. Examples of these derivative works would be translations of works or cinematic adaptations.

we then talked about the term of public domain, this  is when the intellectual property has expired on a works making it available for anyone to use an example of this would be Christmas carols. Another example of this in more recent times is when the English version of Amhrán na bhFiann was running out of copyright and the Irish government was afraid of what would be done with it.

For this weeks task we had to make sure all of our images used in the blog posts are properly cited, this can be easily done by doing a reverse google image search.

 

 

image sourced from http://www.copyrightfrance.com

week 8

In this weeks lecture we talked about the subject of digital image management.

We first talked about how we could capture images on our home-screens in a easy manner, for windows computers you can use the snipping tool which allows you to select certain part of the image on the screen and save it rather than taking a screenshot of the whole screen. This can be quite useful  if you want to save something you can see on your screen but want to do it without having to download anything from the web.

We then went on to talk about image formats, image file formats are are a standardized of organizing and storing  digital images, the files are composed of either pixels, vector data or the both of them combined together, both of these files are rasterized to pixels(pixilized)

Then we started to talk about saving images. when you are saving a file just like the audio format it can be in either in a compressed or uncompressed file format, some compressed formats are Gif,png and jpg while uncompressed formats are psd,tiff and dng.

The most common image format used is the jpg or jpeg, the files are quite small so they are quite convenient to post online to websites, even though it is a compressed file the quality remains relatively unchanged unless you were to download it and re upload multiple times as this leads to degradation of the file.
this video shows us what uploading and downloading a file while do to the quality.
We later talked about image hosting websites, sites such as Photobucket and imgur allow you to upload an image to its server and you can then share the image with other people online. I am quite familiar with imgur as i have often used it, it originally started out as a hosting site solely for the website Reddit but has now turned into a sort of voting system based website where people give up-votes and down-votes to image so they can become more popular the more up-votes it has the higher it will be. A good thing about imgur is that you can use to host an image for a short time without even having to make an account.

We then talked about our last photograph task which was taking 6 images with a common theme about them.

citations
video
youtube.com/canzona

Week 7

For this weeks lecture we talked about digital presentations and different soft wares that could be used for presentations.

Powerpoint

We first talked about PowerPoint presentations. this is probably one of the most widely used software for presentation as it is quite basic and is quite helpful if you want a simple linear presentation. It is also helpful that the slideshow can be printed out and can be giving out to people you are giving the presentation to.

Google docs presentation

This is in a very similar format to he PowerPoint presentation but is useful due to the fact that it can be shared online through gmail and therefore multiple people can collaborate on it at once, this is very useful when a group are giving a presentation and they can then collaborate without having to set up face to face meetings.

Prezi

This was the main talking point of the lecture as are presentation task was to be done using prezi, i am familiar with prezi but i have only ever used the presentation formats that are available and have never made a presentation from scratch. so i found it quite difficult to think of a creative way of doing but i was quite happy with the presentation i came up with. Prezi is quite good presentation tool as you build from scratch an a large canvas and it doesn’t have to follow a linear structure like powerpoint does. and you can also zoom out of the presentaion and see all the slide and pick a particular one rather than on powerpoint where you might have to fumble through the whole thing to find  one slide.

The prezi i completed for the task can be seen in the presentation tab at the top of the page.

citations
image 1
features.en.softonic.com
image 2
guidesandtutorials.com
image 3
mainstreet.com
image 4
prezi.com

week 6 Photo task

For our photo task we had to choose a photo from the retouch pro restoration challenges and use Picasa to restore it as best we could. I chose tho photo of the portrait of a ww2 soldier. The main problem that we can see is the obvious crease going down through the photo, there is also the blemishes all around the photo which is an easy fix. The colour of the photo  also had to be altered slightly.

Before

After

In order to get the after version i firstly cropped the photo in order to removed the damaged part in the bottom left hand corner. I then used the retouch tool to get rid of the blemishes around the photo, after removing as much of the black spots as i could i moved on to the crease on the right of the photo beside the soldiers face. After these two task i moved on to the large crease in the middle, this was harder to fix in certain areas such as the lip and the eye but i was quite pleased with the result. I then adjusted the colour of the photo and then added a sharpen effect and a warmify effect.

week 6

For this weeks lecture we looked at digital image editing, the main focus of the class was how to optimize and retouch photos using software in order to make the pictures better.

The main photo editing tools we looked at were

• Photoshop
• Gimp
• Pixelr
• picasa

Photo shop is the term that has become synonymous with the digital editing of photos in order to make them look better as it being the term that people would use when they would think a photo is fake.

What Photoshop is is an adobe editing program developed by adobe systems, it is the leading editing software in the world which is why its name has become synonymous whit digital editing. unlike the other software we talked about Photoshop isn’t open source so payment is needed to use it.

Gimp is on open source alternative to Photoshop. I have come across this software when people are trying to develop gif files. i have also used for very simple photo editing that i was able to do in the old version of Microsoft paint but can no longer do in newer versions.

Pixelr is a free online photo editing tool that allows you to edit photos through your browser, this would come come in useful if you needed to edit a photo on a computer where you didn’t have download privileges.

Picasa just like Gimp is an open source software, and it is the one that we would be using for our editing task, the layout of the software is quite similar to Photoshop and it is quite easy to use. with this software you can Crop, retouch, add effects, correct colour and edit a batch of photographs. for our our photo task we had to choose a photo from the restoration challenges in retouch pro and try retouch as best we could with picasa. I will have this uploaded shortly.

citations
image 1
logogarden.com
image 2
dailywadle.com
image 3
gimp.org
image 4
pixlr.com
image 5
picasa.google.com
image 6
geckoandfly.com

Week 5 photo task

For the photo task in week five we had to show the effects that landscape and portrait have on a photograph. to show the differences i took a photo of a statue on the canal to show how a difference in photo orientation can affect the style of the photograph.

Firstly i too the photo in the landscape orientation, when in this style i feel that the statue gets lost as it doesn’t seem to be the main focus of the photo, there is too much to either side of the statue like the bin and security camera in the top right and i felt that they don’t add anything to photo .

I then switched to the portrait setting to show the difference, i much prefer how this photo came out. The actual statue is a lot more focal to the picture and isn’t lost in the setting as the clutter to the sides of the photo have been remove. Also when it’s changed to portrait the setting of the canal gave nice effect with the reflection of the statue.

Week 5

In this weeks lecture we looked at what we needed to do in order to publish our podcast.

We talked about what publishing the podcast ad hosting it onto our webpage, Uploading it to a webhost and then how to create a feed for subscriptions.

When our podcast was completed we had to upload to a hosting website, for  this class we were told to use podomatic for our purposes.

Podomatic is a free service which allows us to host our audio file, the site automatically handles the bandwidth and then it will automatically create an rss feed for us to use. So i created an account and uploaded the file i created on audacity onto the website. I got one of the links that was provided and i tried to embed the actual audio file into the website but unfortunately i was unable to do so. so what i had to do was provide a link that would open a new webpage and take you to the podomatic website with the actual audio file there.

I then did the same the same for my rss feed but all i was getting when i clicked it was a wall of text but i found out that it was a browser problem rather than something wrong with the actual feed.

Citations
image
podomatic.com