This is 2 star web assignment #115, “Way Back Time Machine.” The assignment was:

“Using the Way Back Time Machine website on Internet Archive, take screen shots of a favorite website overtime. Then, look at how the website has changed for better and worse. Blog about what makes a website effective and how that changes. See some examples of sites like McDonald’s and Best Buy as they looked in 1996 https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm?hoho“

I decided to use the American Eagle website!

I decided to use screen shots from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011.

2000 and 2004 are extremely simplistic, but not in a good way. In a very boring way. They are just not aesthetically pleasing at all. I liked 2001 and 2002 much more, but they seemed to change for the worse in 2004. 2001 and 2002 just seem a little less simplistic, but definitely still not very modern.

The 2006 and 2007 screen shots definitly show improvement. There is a better color variety and a better layout. It is a little more complex than the layout from previous years. 2007 even has a video clip on the home page.

2008 is probably my favorite screen shot! I love the vintage look with the bright colored wood pieces being used as the background! I think it is a much better use of space also, over all I think it looks awesome!

2010 and 2011 look pretty different than all of the previous years. It definitely looks cool, but not for American Eagle. I really liked the beachy, vintage look of 2008. It looks too modern now, it isn’t as bright and fun as it was.

(I did not take a screen shot of the site today because the homepage is a slideshow; therefore, a screen shot would not be the same, AT ALL!)

I think that American Eagle has probably always been an effective site. It was probably on track with other websites at the time and changed as time and technology did.

This assignment was really interesting! I had no clue there was a site that achieved shots of other sites in the past! Very cool

This is 3 star web assignment #712, “What They Might Have Done in Social Media.” The assignment read:

“Too bad Facebook was not around for most of history! Use the Fakebook tool to make a Facebook profile for a historical figure and make a fake tweet for the same character using the Twister tool. See for Abaraham Lincoln the example of a fake facebook profile and what he might have tweeted.

Make sure what you create is coherent with the person’s background, and explain what it might have meant for that person to use Facebook and twitter “way back then”. Include screen shots and links to what you created, and elaborate on what their use of social media might have been like if it existed for them.”

I decided on Christopher Columbus as my famous person. I don’t really have any special reason for this other than I knew a bit about him and felt comfortable with the knowledge I had.

Oh! And I really like the poem we were always taught about him:

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.”

This assignment was a lot of fun! (Silly, but awesome)

On Columbus’ Fakebook, I added 5 friends. The King and Queen hired him to go on this voyage, they are his cyber friends so that they can track the events of the voyage and easily communicate with him. Vinecent and Martin were the captains of the two other ships. They are his fakebook friends just in case they get split up at sea or need to communicate from ship to ship. And Leif Ericsson was a viking that Columbus met, they are friends so that they can keep in touch and hopefully meet again.

On his page I posted a status right after he left for his journey, when he arrived at his destination and once he arrived home.

The tweet is pretty self explanatory! Columbus though he had gone around the world to Asia, but he actually discovered North America.

This assignment was pretty neat. I have never hear of twister or fakebook. Fakebook really seemed very similar to facebook!! Both sites were easy to use, I like that!

View Fullscreen | Create your own

Who has watched The Tudors before? well I have just started it and so for the Fakebook assignment I decided to do it on Henry VIII, send him a fakebook friend request today!

Basically all I did was go on Wikipedia and find all the concrete dates I could out of there… up to the point in The Tudors I am currently at… I don’t want any spoilers and used the Fakebook tool. I actually created one of these earlier in the week about Ulysses S. Grant (real name Hiram Ulysses Grant) because he shared my name… though it didn’t save and I didn’t feel like redoing everything.

Michael Jackson has Risen from the grave read the full story here.

In this week we started to do HTML and the web to tell stories. I took an HTML class back in highschool so I thought I’d give the whole Raw HTML thing a try and I think I did a decent job. The HTML they use in most websites these days are much more complicated than anything I ever messed with (plus it has been a few years). The hardest part was finding where all the text was located within the coding so I could edit it. sites like this often have 500+ lines of coding so ti’s a bit tricky to make sure you get all the original text out of it so there are no indications that it is a doctored site.

I first had to find an idea to use, so what do I do? ask if anyone has Any Ideas (see what I did there). And one response was Zombie Michael Jackson. Now the original idea was a bit convoluted and way to involved and a little politically biased so I stuck with the zombie michael jackson/elvis presley revenge thing. I changed the title, the author, and the article text but there was still something missing… the original article I used had a video embedded in it but when I took it out there was still a huge space… which I couldn’t figure out how to remove… so I filled it with another video, one of a thriller flash mob in Boulder, CO… which is where MJ is holding up till his demands are met.

Throughout high-school and college, foreign language teachers and professors are ALWAYS telling their students never to use www.freetranslation.com . I usually abide by their requests, knowing that most translations turn out horribly inaccurate. But, sometimes I will use it to translate part of a paragraph that I don’t understand, or to just find the quick translation of a word. Well, I win this week and this is how…It’s web assignment week…(I’m still trying to figure out what the heck I’m supposed to be doing lol) and there is an assignment worth 1 star called Google Translate Fail. I had a Spanish exam this week and my professor put out some sample questions. I answered one and I wanted to check to see if I did the sentence right. Well I didn’t use Google, instead I used Free Translation. What I wanted to say was “I lived in Manassas when I was 10 years old.”

….NO BUENO! 10 tapeworm anuses? Seriously? You’ve got to be joking me. Well it’s true, go type in what you see and you will get the same result. I even did it twice to make sure it wasn’t my computer playing a joke on me! Well, luckily for me, Google has a translator that kicks ass and this was the answer I WAS looking for

MUY BUENO!!! Yes, yes I did live in Manassas at age 10! Google saved the day, and my grade! (Well, at least I hope I aced the test )

Storytelling Within the Web

“ 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.”

For this assignment I made a google search about cooking up kittens. Before you think I’m totally crazy.. there is a story. I got a kitten this summer, 8 weeks old and all of 2 lbs on a fat day. I’m sure you’ve seen him in my pictures and previous posts. He is adorable, but definitely a bit of a menace, so all summer while I was home my dad would joke that he was only still around because he was too small to eat yet (strange sense of humor in my family I know). Hence the idea of kitten recipes.

I made this site my google searching chicken recipes and then changing the word chicken to kittens throughout the page with the X-Ray Goggles program. Then I copied the raw HTML code for the site, went to my UMW domain site, created a sub-domain, went to files and edited the index file inside the new sub-domain to create the site. I don’t know if this was the way I was supposed to do it, but it worked!

Here is my site: kittens.amelialord.com

and some screen shots:

This is one of my favorite places to type into google maps. Why? because that must be i need directions there. I love Wrightsville beach. My Aunt and Uncle first started taking me there with my cousin when I was just a kid. The “B” on the map shows where we’d first enter the island. That is after breakfast at Causeway Cafe. I always get the banana nut bread french toast. MHHMM!! soo good. Then we’d take a right and drive down to that pier. We would stay in a hotel close by. And it’s on of my favorite surf spots! the water is so clear, almost tropical. The waves are much better then Virginia beach. After a long day of surfing, we’d drive back down by the entrance to each at Tower 7. That place is the bomb. It’s a mexican food surf shake restaurant.  They have the most delicious burritos. Perfect for the after ocean starve!

What if Twitter and Facebook were around back in the day of exploration?

You know Lewis and Clark would have taken advantage of that. I mean they traveled away from all their friends. They’d defiantly want to keep in contact. So i made a page for William Clark.  If he was to tweet hears one thing he’d say.

I love traveling. And with a pretty lady! #SorryLewis #Yougotnochance #LouisianaPurchase

— William Clark (@Clarkinit) October 24, 2012

I also made a Facebook account for William Clark. He would be a little offended because they didnt have his birthday date. The earliest was like 1905. Poor Clark. But he can pretend he’s excepted.  Check out His facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004609260755

I think i picked to do William Clark because he traveled. It wasn’t an obvious choice from history so I had to do it. PLus, i love traveling.

The assignment, Google History Maps Story, turned out to be by far one of my favorite assignments! I have no idea why… There wasn’t much to it. I went to Google maps and created my own map of destinations. I was trying to think of a historical/literary figure that traveled a lot. It was then I remembered the book/movie Around the World in 80 Days. I thought this was perfect for the assignments. I couldn’t find a good schedule/remember what happened exactly in each place so I just did the proposed schedule. It was simple to do just finding the places on the map and linking them.

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=ll