In the Assignment Way Back Time Machine, I used the Internet Archive’s Way Back Time Machine to analyze how YouTube has changed through the years.

Originally, YouTube was very basic. Not too much main page advertizing made the page seem less clustered than today’s YouTube. The simpleness of the website’s look in 2005 is relieving compared to the new site. You can see exactly what you want to accomplish as far as searching for videos, signing in, and browsing trends right away, because the website is simple and the features pop out more. The site was not as flashy as it would become.

Skipping ahead to 2008, YouTube has developed and become the biggest online video sharing website in the world. The icons and logos have been redesigned giving it a fresher look. They are no longer using trends, but rather just recommended videos for easier browsing. The site looks clean and trimmed, giving it a professional look and user friendly.

Now on to today’s Youtube. Advertizements are the biggest things on the page. After you see around the ads, a lot of what used to be user friendly is now hidden in a failed attempt to look more user friendly but also trim down the site. One of the more irritating things is there is no immediate place to register for YouTube. You can only find Sign In buttons. Unless you are already registered with YouTube, I can see this being frustrating. Besides the disregard for usability, the site does look trim, flashy, and modern.

In this web assignment I must use images from Google Street View to make a story.

Frank’s Salt Water Taffy is the best in all of Virginia. He makes taffy at Forbes’ Salt Water Taffy in Virginia Beach, VA down Atlantic Avenue, and he is so passionate about his taffy, he even decked out his whole van with his passion of making Forbes’ Taffy. It’s a good thing he can use Google Maps as an alibi, because his wife has been suspicious about his late hours and whereabouts when he goes to work. She does not appreciate the effort it takes to make the best taffy in all of Virginia, and how time consuming it must be. Here is a picture of Franks’ van at work. Exactly were he said he would be.

Poor Frank. His wife is obsessed with the idea that Frank isn’t where he says he is. You can see her friend Linda walking her dog past the shop like clockwork every morning to spy on Frank. It may be that Frank is aware of his wife’s spying, but most believe Frank is a stand up guy and is as true a husband as his taffy is true in good taste. Frank’s best friend Al has always had is back. Frank feels so sad about the fact that his wife has no faith in him, he often spends time with Al at their favorite bar pictured here. Maybe if Frank spent less time at the bar with Al, and came home to his family earlier, his wife wouldn’t have to worry as much. Until then, poor old Frank endures knowing that he makes the best taffy in Virginia, and he has great best friend in Al, and a wife that cares about him enough to keep holding on.

Using Google X-Ray Goggles from Hackersaurus, I “hacked” Twitter to show what it would look like if pirates were to take over Twitter. Here is a screen shot of the finished project.

I used the Twitter main page for my project and this is the link to the assignment.

I’m going to publish my weird borked edited web page for the evil awful horrid honestly quite educational Storytelling Within the Web assignment right now so that the code is at the very least out there and accessible before the storm robs me of my interwebs. Here’s what it ought to look like (flaws and all):

Read on for the full writeup…

This assignment basically decimated my brain. And the sad thing is, I was super excited for this week when it all began:

The degree to which I am excited for this week’s #ds106 assignments might actually be detectable from space. #webshenanigans #4life

— Haley (@doodle_muse) October 23, 2012

But I got freaked out by the amount of stuff I wanted to do and how unfamiliar the coding language was and Firebug not working and me being more or less unable to make heads or tails of it anyway, and before I knew it I had zero time and less plan.

My first thought was to turn Prof. Levine’s blog into a bunny sanctuary (the new title was going to be BunnyButtsBlog. GENIUS), but I couldn’t figure out how to edit the header image behind the very first navigational menu. After failed attempts with Hackasaurus, the Firebug extension failing to show up in my browser even after extensive troubleshooting and some unsuccessful prodding with a 30-day free trial of Dreamweaver, I gave  up and moved on to sillier, lamer things.

Expanding on my original idea of invading Prof. Levine’s blog with pictures of adorable fluffy bunny rabbits, I decided to edit my Goodreads.com recommendations page to do something similar. Instead of a site that suggests awesome books, my thought process went, how about a site that recommends cute little animals to hug and squeeze and love (but nobody is calling them George). Here’s what my rec’s page looked like originally:

Because you can never have enough poetry in your life. Never ever.

I discovered that to make the images look reasonable and not squished and malformed, I was going to have to edit them myself. Desperate as I was by that point, I did a few quick image searches and grabbed whatever images I could find of “cute puppies,” “chinchillas,” “bunny rabbits” and “cute reptiles” (yes, snakes are adorable. Yes, I will fight you on that point). After snagging five from each category I’d made up, I opened them all in GIMP and cropped them to more or less the right dimensions, then got the aspect ratio perfect with the “Scale Image” tool. Finally I uploaded all of the images (including a modified Goodreads logo) into a private, unsearchable folder in my Flickr account to prevent the images from being recirculated too widely and then went image-crazy with Hackasaurus.

Several hours later when I thought I was finished it barfed up some completely unusable code that I had to look up tutorials in order to save properly, because Notepad is pure evil. I have no idea why the HTML I got from that program was borked, if it had something to do with me saving the file improperly or if the Coding Gods are just particularly cruel and capricious to newbies, but whatever the case, I couldn’t use the web page I’d worked so hard to edit.

The one good thing Hackasaurus did was familiarize me with code in a way that wasn’t entirely overwhelming. I decided to just save the source code of the Goodreads page I wanted to alter, open it up in Dreamweaver and see what there was to see. With the split-screen view I was able to click on elements visually and see which lines of code corresponded to them, and pretty soon I was editing the code alone (also necessary, as the split-screen view makes the program freeze up on my craptop every other minute).

After several more hours of painstakingly editing the same lines of code over and over again, copy+pasting image locations from Flickr and uploading the file every now and again to see if it looked presentable, I once again had a more or less working web page. Despite all my issues with this assignment, I am kind of impressed that I mostly just muddled through it myself without looking at tutorials or coding guides. I just sorta looked at stuff and figured out what needed to go where, which suggests that coding websites is actually not that difficult at all.

Regarding the story behind my altered web page, I feel like Cutebreeds (See? SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!?!) is a site that someone would visit if they really needed to calm down after a long, stressful day at work. Maybe it would crop up as an extension of Tumblr or Pinterest, where you can share content extremely easily across user spaces. The cutest animal images and videos would be determined by user ratings and the reach of any individual piece of media would be dependent on how far users were willing to share it, thereby determining its popularity.

Or maybe it’d just be a hangout for wannabe crazy cat ladies. I’d be into a website like that.

In an effort to further my understanding of the folks who create some of my favorite anime, I thought I’d attempt the Google Translate assignment on the Studio Gainax website.

… it went about as well as I’d expected.

Not sure if this is a stable link, but you can see the entire page I translated here. I decided to go with an info page for one of the staff members because the info pages for the animes themselves were, surprisingly enough, translated pretty well. The staff pages had more colloquialisms, presumably, and less carefully edited copy, so they proved a bit more humorous when poorly translated.

Finding a page in another language that had enough text (versus images with text as part of the image) was, interestingly, the hardest part of this assignment. It’s difficult to find a page in another language unless you know the exact page you’re looking for. That’s what eventually led me to Studio Gainax’s Japanese homepage—I know the domain for Japanese websites is .jp, so I figured the URL of a major animation studio would likely be the studio’s name followed by .jp, and fortunately I was correct.

This assignment brings to mind two things. First, a topic I’ve discussed in several of Prof. Zach Whalen’s classes: the way that glitches in games change the game’s narrative as a whole. A crappy translation strikes me as quite similar, in the sense that it’s altering the meaning of a given text and essentially creating an entirely new text for the reader to interpret. Ergo, in reading the altered, translated text from the Gainax staff member’s page, I’m accessing a completely different character than the individual he wrote into existence when he filled out this survey, as created by the crappy translation. It’s a fascinating concept, and pulls in the idea of reality, textuality, online identity, interpretation and the subjectivity of storytelling and information transfer.

It also brought to mind this classic translation fail, which will never, ever get old.

The majority of the translated text is below, just in case the link above decides to die (my favorite sections are in bold):

Ryouta Kiyohara Ryota Kiyohara
(Update History: 2010) [ Type B ] [ Employee GAINAX ] [ Hanamaru Kindergarten ] [ Gurren Lagann ] [ Shikabane Hime]

Production Affiliation: Born September 24 Birthday: Type B: blood type
? ? Internal work career
Production progress “Gen-Shikabane Hime Aka” progress “Production Gurren Lagann” “The Hanamaru Kindergarten” making progress

20 ? ? Questions

What Is Fetish: Q01?
> I can not say here.

Q02: When do you feel happy?
> When it is busy.

What is the history of the industry: Q03?
> About 4 years.

Q04: I wanted an opportunity to enter the animation industry?
> I know that the job of making progress.

Why you came to Gainax does (I chose): Q05?
> Other companies did not know much.

Q06: The first impression when I came to Gainax is it?
> I thought I’m free I wonder.

Q07: Gainax work do you like? The reason?
> Work involved is all I like. Memories of struggled because there is.

Since the beginning of the industry up to now, most work was fun: Q08? It was the situation like?
> Is any fun, when it is most busy.

Q09: things that you can not be the work and do not have it?
> Vegetable juice.

The thing on the desk of the company, I have it on the most important: Q10? Why is that?
> Vegetable juice. In order to keep the body like a teenager.

Q11: anime for the first time you saw it? When there?
> It is from the time we arrived remember. “It Dorimogu Da!”

Q12: (I want to draw) situations favorite anime?
> LOL You’re such a scene.

I (OK even before birth) because now say, I wanted to participate in anime: Q13
> Great, assembled insert, Super Milk Chan, Li Azumanga dream Dream Hunter

Q14: I was afraid of the most happening until now?
> Neighbor’s fire.

Q15: In the event was the happiest ever?
> I can put to work right now.

What do you do to the earth explode tomorrow: Q16?
> As usual.

What is the flow of his own maxim: Q17?
> And serious sex appeal is issued Choi.

Word to me years ago 10: Q18!
> This is the cheers for good work.

Word to me years later 10: Q19!
> This is the cheers for good work.

What last word: Q20! !
> Thank you Gainax future.