One of the assignments for this week was to do five stars, of our choice as usual. I decided to do the Youtube It Your Way Assignment, which involves picking a favorite video (for which I choose Bath Time!) but the kick is to alter the webpage so that no one has any actual idea of what the video is. I altered the description, the amount of views, the side videos and even the like button! See what else you can notice! I Here is a screen shot of before:

And here’s after!

To successfully do this, I used the wondeful Hackasaurus, which works such wonders. This was worth four ?’s, and it is an entirely fun assignment to do since it involves creativity and just bein silly. Here’s its own webpage if you wanna see it that way too!

For my next Web Assignment I did What They Might Have Done In Social Media.  The premise of this assignment was to make a Facebook and twitter for any historical person.  I decided that my person that i wanted to do was Julius Caesar.  Since the Ides of March just passed about a week ago, I felt that this was appropriate.

To make the Facebook I used Fakebook.  This website was super easy to use and all you had to do was insert different posts and bios similarly to how you would add them on Facebook.  Here is my Julius Caesar Facebook page:

To make his twitter I used Twister. Just like Fakebook this was quite easy to use.  You just had to type in the name of the person you were using and what you wanted to tweet.  The website inserted the picture and everything.  Here is my Julius Caesar tweet:

That’s five stars!!

For the main project of the week, we were to take an existing webpage and create some changes to it. This is actually a ds106 web assignment- Storytelling within the Web and it’s worth 5 stars.

The hardest part about this assignment was finding a webpage to actually do the assignment on. I looked on Amazon, IMDB, Pinterest, and Craigslist. I looked at the past students work and some work that current ds106ers have done and always thought, “I wish I had thought of that.” Finally I decided to just google “weird Craigslist ads” and came across this one: Wanted: Mule named Sal.

Well it’s definitely an interesting request to make. So I decided I’d just edit it a little I keep some parts from the original and elaborated on the rest, and tried to put some humor into it. So here’s what I came up with:

Wanted: Traveling Partner

Pretty neat, huh? To create these changes I used the Moxilla Hackasaurus tool. I found it very easy to use and had no problems at all. So tell me, do you think we can find a mule, named Sal with all of these characteristics? I might be possible!

For my first web design assignment this week I did Google Map Trip. This assignment was to “use Google Maps to tell a story! It can be the story of a trip you took, a trip you would like to take, a strange occurrence, a war, anything you like! The only rules are that you have to use Google Maps proper in order to tell your story, and post it here.”

When I saw this assignment I right away  knew that I was going to do a map of my last few weeks to say I’ve been up and down is only kind of an exaggeration.  The last weekend of February I went to Richmond to see Mary Poppins in an off Broadway production.  The next weekend was spring break and I went to Disney for a week.  The next weekend was my birthday so I went home to visit my family.  This weekend I went to a concert with my little sister in Charlotte, North Carolina. And next weekend I am going to the beach with my extended family and family friends in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.  So like I said, I have been all over in the past few weeks.

And here is what these weeks look on a map! Goodness gracious!

Two stars down! Three more to go!

This 3 star “What they might have done in Social Media” assignment was really interesting. The purpose was to take a historical figure and create a “Fakebook” and use “Twister” to show what sort of tweets the person might have sent out if they had social media while they were alive.

Due to my recent trip to DisneyWorld, I was inspired to create a Fakebook for the main man himself,  Walter Elias “Walt” Disney. I did look him up on Facebook and he definitely has a fan page, but I get if he had a Facebook while he was alive, it would be magical.

I hope this “FakeBook” makes Mr. Disney proud!

And if he had a twitter, he might have tweeted out something along these lines:

This assignment was a blast! It was fun to consider what Mr. Disney would have tweeted or  facebook-ed about if he had access to these social media outlets. I think he would have really enjoyed being able to connect with all the people who loved Mickey, just as much as he did.

To complete Storytelling within the web, I chose to intervene in the design of a post from Craigslist.  Before even searching on Craigslist, I chose to take the easier Hackasaurus approach instead of altering raw code.  I downloaded the X-Ray Goggles into my bookmark bar, which allowed me to change the text, format, and images of any web page.

I went searching on Craigslist for any headline that caught my eye that I could make a story about.  I stumbled across a listing of a fairy pin for sale.  I immediately knew what I could turn this posting in to. The original listing is for a winged fairy pin for $5, made of  crystal insets and silver metal.  I activated my X-Ray Goggles and started altering the page.

First, I made the pin listed by “Fairies R Us” and changed the price from $5 to “Priceless”.  I then spruced up the description by saying it was made of Diamonds, Platinum, and Swarovski crystals. Finally, I created the illusion that wearing this pin would allow you to fly and would protect you from air planes.  I added a twist by doing a spin-off of an alcohol commercial when they say, “Please fly responsibly.”  Also, you have to go to the sky to buy the pin according to the location.

My edited site can be found here.

I wanted to make this page in my own site, but I couldn’t get it to work.  The NotePad program wouldn’t let me save my code.  There were no error messages, but whenever I hit “save”, nothing happened, so I just published the site and obtained a URL (found above).