Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Above is the screenshot. Here’s the link from Hackasaurus: https://thimbleprojects.org/HTTP/fcmaisano/568534/


So, for my web storytelling assignment, I decided to change a news article to about the yowie. The day I am writing this is the day that our radio show goes up, so I thought it was a good time. The mentioning of using news articles made me think of discoveries, and then my radio show story.

So, to do it, I used the Smithsonian magazine website, as they are what I think of when I think of scientific discoveries and research. In the searchbar there, I typed in words such as “discover”, so try and get an article that I could use the base of. When I typed in “footage” I found this article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-leopard-call-gets-caught-tape-180967400/. I was drawn in by the absolutely adorable leopard cubs (I want to hold them so bad!), and then when I looked over the article I figured that the article would work well. What’s also cool is that the publish date was December 4th, which is my birthday! (Obviously, I was not born in 2017, though. I’m more than 10 months old!).

Writing the actual wording for this was not hard. I actually copied the last part of the title to use, the last sentence of the first paragraph to use, and part of the fifth paragraph to use. I even copied the first five words of the article! I figured that it would be cool to keep some aspects of the original, just change them to fit my story. For the first five paragraphs, I tried to use the same general ideas or topics from the paragraph and translate them into my story. For example, I talked about the fight-or-flight response of the yowie because the original article talked about physical confrontation. The last two paragraphs I added in extra details that I thought were important from the radio show and an ending to the article. I even changed the tags at the bottom to match the article, though they still link to their original places. I changed the author’s name to my name, so that way it is obvious that I wrote this, not some poor, unsuspecting person who has no idea who I am or why I am doing this. I also did write most of it, so I am the author! (Though, I did take some from the original and was inspired by much of it). I also changed the date to today’s date, as that is when I wrote it!

My biggest issue was using the Mozilla X-Ray Goggles. Perhaps it is because I use chrome, I had so much trouble! First of all-I couldn’t do the tutorial. When I clicked, the coding didn’t show up. I tried several times but it never worked. Ironically, it worked the first time when I went to a different website. Then, when I was working on the article, sometimes something would happen and when I clicked on something to edit it, no code came up. If I hit “update” or “cancel” whatever I was trying to edit would go away and then it would be gone. To get it back, I would have to refresh the page, loosing all of my progress. I kept my new wording in a Word document, so that way I could just copy-paste it instead of having to type it out all of the time. I had to refresh and try again so, so many times. It took me so much longer than it should have-it took over an hour since the time that I had already written out everything I wanted to say to be able to complete the article. Then, after all of that, I had trouble taking the screenshot and uploading it here. I downloaded the “Full Page Screen Capture” app from the Chrome Web Store. It actually worked great, then it was too large to add to this post! I had to go into Paint.net to cut the picture so that only what I edited showed, so that way it was small enough to insert here.

Overall, this was fun, but frustrating. If I have to use this again, I might try Mozilla, use ad-blocker to see if the refreshing ads were the issue, or use a smaller/different web page!

P.S. I named this blog post “Extra! Extra! Hear All About It!” because not only is that a saying associated with newspapers, and though this is not a newspaper, it is news, but also because the blog post I write before this one is titled “Extra! Extra! Hear All About It!” because it was about the radio show I listened to. I thought it was a nice little continuation of a name/theme!


While this assignment is the Web Storytelling assignment, which is not from the assignment bank, it does mention to use this assignment:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/storytelling-within-the-web/

 

The yowie picture is the same one I used in my postcard assignment:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yowie_Statue,_Yowie_Park,_Kilcoy,_Queensland.JPG

English: Yowie Statue, Yowie Park, Kilcoy, Queensland. Photo taken on 21 April 2013

Somersetpedia.paul

 

The Featured image is the snipping tool snip of my edited web page. I took a snipping of the top of the web page before I downloaded and used the app

Tutorial: Storytelling Within The Web!

This week every DS106 student was required to create a tutorial for an assignment in the DS106 Assignment Bank.  The assignment that I decided to create a tutorial for was the Storytelling Within the Web assignment that was required for this week.  I had trouble with this assignment at first, so I created this video tutorial to help anyone who has yet to do the assignment, as well as any students who take DS106 in the future!

 

Storytelling Within the Web

From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site. Essentially you alter the content of a web page (content, images) to make it tell a new story.

Originally we recommended doing this using the Firebug extension in the Firefox browser, which does work, but is unfortunately easy to lose your work. We currently recommend Mozilla Hackasaurus — install the X-Ray Googles in any browser and use it to re-cast the content of any web page.

When you blog it, include both a screen capture in your post, but you will also need to upload the web files (HTML and media files) to your own site so it can exist as a stand alone URL. (see our older Firebug Tutorial)

Consider using news sites, social media profiles, product pages, movie review pages etc. The simpler the design of the page, the easer it will be (think Craig’s List).