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).

Google Map Trip, worth 2 stars, called for me to tell a story of a trip I’d taken using Google Maps.  I chose this web assignment to increase the challenge on web storytelling and because I had just taken a trip today!

My team at UMW traveled to Poolesville, MD today to play American University.  We left the University (A) at 8am and stopped at WaWa (B) to get breakfast (tradition).  Once we got food and drinks, we got on 95 N and drove for 1.5 hours until we reached Poolesville (C).  Unfortunately, once we got there, we discovered there were no toilets at the field (WHAT), so we quickly piled back into the vans and found the closest place with a bathroom…A church (D)…AWKWARD!! We then went back to the pitch (E) and played our games. On a side note, both our A & B sides won!  On our way back home, we zipped to a McDonald’s (F) before sitting in traffic on 95 before we got back to Uni (G).

To dabble in some web storytelling, I completed the web assignment Google Translate Fail, worth 1 star, from the ds106 assignment bank. I chose this assignment because as a French minor, I know how google translate can interpret another language into English.  First, I went to the website for the Le Monde newspaper, a famous paper in France, and then found the sports section.  I thought sports would be an interesting topic to translate. There was a cool article on The X Games (ou Les X Games) that I took the summary of and translated it in Google Translate.

“the Winter X Games Europe Tignes is open” actually translates to “the European Winter X Games opened Wed. in Tignes.” Then “Story in pictures” is more closely translated to “the images depict/show”. Finally, the last part is better meant as “which leaves those extreme skiing junkies very hungry.”