WebAssignments – Assignment Bank

Pinteresting Character

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I got this idea from Alan’s example for our final projects. I couldn’t find an assignment for it… so I made my own!

The task: Build a Pinterest page of at least 20 pins for a character of your choice. Search for pins that relate to your character and things that he or she would want to pin for themselves. Use X-Ray Goggles from Hackasaurus to modify the board further to personalize it for your character. Bonus points if you build a page and have visitors to your blog guess which character you picked!

The product:

Since I’m the first person to complete this assignment, I should just tell you which character I chose. If it isn’t already obvious, I chose Dexter Morgan.

Not that he’d ever have a Pinterest page, but I imagine his would look much like this. Interest in knives, removing blood stains, understanding his teenage daughter, etc.

Probably one of the more interesting assignments for web, I think! You get to build on a story of your favorite character.

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The Internet is for Porn!: How Trekkie Monster sees Reddit…

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When I first saw the Telling Stories Within The Web assignment, I thought that I may redo Reddit using html, as seen by various characters from Musical Theatre interacting with each other, but soon abandoned that idea when I found the code to be too tricky to modify. I then decided that I should focus on one specific character and quickly chose Trekkie Monster, the porn obsessed monster from Avenue Q, one of my all time favorite works of Musical Theatre.

To do this, I first turned off the Reddit Enhancement Suite in Google Chrome, one of my favorite extensions, fearing that it would make modification too hard and logged into Reddit using my alternate account, since when using my main account, I am a mod of the ds106 subreddit, which causes some mod stuff to show up in my top navigation bar, something I did not think Trekkie would see if he was just a casual redditor who used reddit mainly to satisfy his love of porn, something he sings about in the show in The Internet Is For Porn. I subscribed temporarily to a handfull of porn subreddits with the account, wanting to get the formatting of the posts from those subreddits (NSFW subreddits are formatted differently on the front page than regular ones), which I thought that Trekkie would be subscribed to, correct and upvoted some posts on the page, so that it looked like Trekkie had been interacting with the site.

This is what Reddit looked like before I modified it. Simple right?

I then used Hackasarus to modify the text of all of the posts and changed all of the photos on the front page posts as well as adding some so they would better be able to fit into Trekkie’s world. I also changed up usernames for all of the posters, making some of them character specific to Avenue Q, (WhatChaTalkinAboutGary, straightasarod, xxxlucyxxx, and sadPrinceston) and others generically related to the world of the show. I did the same with the posts, making some, like the Gary Coleman AMA, the news article about the internet being for porn and the AskReddit post about finding one’s purpose in life, coming directly from the lyrics of the show and others being more general. I changed the titles of some of the subreddits that Trekkie is subscribed to, making up a few like ‘puppetsgonewild’ and ‘worldboobs,’ and made some of the posts imply that the world has both a puppet and human culture.

Here is the final result: Reddit as Trekkie Monster sees it.

In hindsight, if I was to change anything about this assignment, I may have done my work in a different browser, as I doubt that Trekkie Monster would use a blue Jonathan Adler theme in Chrome or would have bookmark folders for ‘crafts,’ ‘UMW,’ or ‘ds106′ and a link to pin things to Pintrest in his browser. He instead would most likely have links to things like YouPorn and the like, but that may be just me being picky. Otherwise, I like how Trekkie’s Reddit turned out and wouldn’t mind making reddit front pages from the view of other fictional characters as I really enjoyed doing this assignment.

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Youtubing it My Way, Or “Mary finally got a facebook”

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We had to complete five-stars worth of assignments from the Web Design bank this week. I had so much fun with the Hackasaurus tool that I chose to go with the assignment that required us to use it again! I chose “Youtube it Your Way” for my first assignment, which was worth three stars.

There is a really adorable video of a lamb hopping through somebody’s house, and all of the linked videos are of lambs or goats as well. This is what the page looks like really:

Here’s the page after I was finished with it:

And here’s the actual page.

For this one, I changed the page to be about President Obama. I tried to edit the link video titles to have something to do with what was in the image AND President Obama, but sometimes it’s just about the President. I also edited the comment section because I wanted it to be relevant to the new topic of the page but also reflective of the Youtube comment streams, which are often terrifying and/or immature.

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For the second assignment that I chose, I did “What They Might Have Done in Social Media.” This assignment was worth two stars, totalling me at 5 stars!

For this assignment, I chose to make a facebook page and a tweet for Mary Magdalene. I originally was going to try to do something more contemporary, but as a religion major whose focus is women in early Christianity, I wanted to choose something more closely related to my major. Mary Magdalene often gets an unearned reputation as a prostitute or a repentant whore. In the Bible, she is referred to as neither of these things. In fact, she is only mentioned at all a handfull of times and none of them have anything to do with her profession. Her only fault in the Bible is having a popular name for the time, and her image is conflated with that of another woman who is called a prostitute and then a few centuries into Christianity, a Pope declared in his Easter Homily that several of the women in the Gospels, including Mary Magdalene, were the same woman. And ta-da! Mary’s suddenly a prostitute.

So I decided to create a facebook page that would be updated and commented on at and following Jesus’ death. Due to speculation that she was in a relationship with Jesus, I have her listed as ‘in a relationship’ and she is devastated following his death (not that she’d have to be dating him to be sad). Her twitter account is updated once rumors of her being a prostitute show up and she is complaining about being “misunderstood.”

Check both pages out:

Mary’s facebook.
Mary’s Twitter.

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Teddy Roosevelt***

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To complete my 5 stars worth of assignments, I did the “what they might have done in social media” activity. Worth 3 stars, I chose Teddy Roosevelt as my historical figure, because he is one of my favourite president’s. His facebook showed him in his golden years and talked about his job and birthdate.

His twitter announced in 1901 that he had just become the 26th President of the United States.

Like Barack Obama did in the recent elections, I believe that Teddy Roosevelt could have really used Facebook and Twitter to promote his candidacy and get the support of the voters.

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Translation Fail…

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Today I leared that my favorite baseball team, the New York Mets once played at Shay’s 84380 Radium.

Knowing the history of the Mets, I can assure you that they never played at a nuclear site, or anything like it. That failed translation was one of many I found when translating the mlbkorea.com page for The Mets from Korean to English for the 1-star Google Translate Fail assignment.

The team’s profile seemed sparse in Korean, but I was able to guess that the top information was the team name, the year founded (1962) and the number of World Series wins (2). The big blob of text was what I thought to be team history followed by the team’s nickname (Amazing Mets) and lastly the places where the team played, Citi Field (20o9-present), Shea Stadium (1964-2009) and the Polo Grounds (1962-1964).

After translating it with the automatic translator built into Google Chrome, I discovered that my guesses were close, translation wise, although the Mets only played at the Polo Grounds from 1962-1963, and Citi Field and Shea Stadium are both misspelled, quite possibly due to them not being directly translatable.

I was curious about the missing paragraph and went back to the Korean page, and copy/pasted it into Google Translate. What I got was this:

Queens, New York, New York Mets (New York Mets), is a Major League Baseball team. The New York Yankees of the American League and National League Eastern District of New York franchise. 1962 Brooklyn Dodgers (Los Angeles Dodgers) and New York Giants (now San Francisco Giants) Footsteps – Move over, empty’ve replaced the National Football League’s New York team was founded. Called Subway Series New York Yankees in the World Series in 2000, it was stuck, assume. 1 wins, four losses, the Mets finished runner-up in the Earth’s Philadelphia Phillies and the rivalry is strong.

Which I think is supposed to say that

The Mets are located in Queens, New York
They play in the National League East while the New York Yankees play for the American League East.
They were formed in 1962 after the Brooklyn Dodgers (now Los Angeles Dodgers) and the New York Giants (San Francisco Giants) left the city.
They played the Yankees in the 2000 World Series which was dubbed the Subway Series and lost 4-1.
Their rivals are the Philadelphia Phillies.

While I have seen worse translations, this one is rather bad. If I didn’t know Mets history, I doubt that I would have understood what the translated page was saying.

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Wonderous Webby Web Work

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This week has taken a completely different turn from the last but if you’ve been keeping up with ds106, you should know by now this is nothing new. This week involved getting involved with the web and really taking it into our own hands. One of the assignments was Story Telling Within the Web, which involved downloading a program and altering a webpage. This is one of those weeks where I wish I was better at HTML but alas, I succeeded with the majority so I won’t beat myself up over it! I have to give praise this week to Hackasaurus, which really saved my butt. At first glance, it seemed really complicated, and like a buttload of downloads but as promised, it came through despite being overwhelmed at first. So I started off this assignment but going through craigslist and finding an ad in the Fredericksburg area to keep it local, I ended up going with one from the gig section. See:

It was a very innocent, non-funny post, right? Right. So I decided to have some fun with and add some humor to the post because how else would they attract any attention?

I know, I’m quite the comedian, please save your praise until the end of my post, aka the comments. I decided to mess with the obvious things, such as the title, but I even messed with the top links, and although I failed in changing where the links led to, at least I changed the title of the hyperlink. be sure to comment if you find any just knee-slapping hilarious. Here is the link to its own webpage just because that’s how official it is!

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ESPN Time Machine

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Another assignment I chose to complete is the Way Back Time Machine. The assignment called for “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.” The site I chose to analyze is ESPN , and I am going to check the site’s progression in 2 year intervals, beginning with 1998. Here, the site looks rather bland, as was the standard in the 1990′s. If this were the ESPN site today, it would not be looked upon as the “worldwide leader in sports” anymore.

Next, we have ESPN in the year 2000. As you can see, the site has become more interactive with a score ticker, as well as a survey on the right sidebar. There is also a lot more color present. Clearly, there has been much progress since ’98.

Next, the year is 2002. The webpage content is similar to what it was in 2000, however the major difference is the new logo. I have to agree that the new logo is more aesthetically pleasing.

Next, in 2004, all whitespace has finally been eliminated from the homepage, which is customary for webpages today.

In 2006, you can finally see the resemblance to what the site looks like today, with links to the main stories of the day on the side of the page. These links are helpful as they provide a detailed title, which gives the user an idea of what links will interest them.

In 2008, you can see the first mention of mobile integration of ESPN. They are advertising their podcasts that can be listened to on your phone. How innovative! Also, we get a first glimpse of the top score bar that is used today.

In 2010, the site is essentially the same as we know it today. This is also the first instance we see the option to choose your city on the top of the page.

And finally, here is ESPN.com as we know it today.

All in all, this was a very interesting experience to see the progression of ESPN’s landing page throughout the years. From the times of Dial-Up connection to the Wi-Fi today.

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Hidden Stories**

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So for this assignment, we had to put a random story in the middle of a webpage. I inserted part of “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde into a Wikipedia article on Kim Jong-Il. Honestly, I don’t think there is a more fitting place for this, especially since I used to have so much fun changing Wikipedia pages in middle school. Did you know Napoleon was the primary enemy in the Vietnam War?

http://p.webremixes.org/gifocpkc

Here’s the regular page if you want to see that too.

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Multipurpose Cork Plugs****

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For this assignment, we had to change a webpage to alter the descriptions of a product on Amazon. I made a very multipurpose cork. I used hackasaurus and just changed stuff.

http://p.webremixes.org/qdxtohzc

Here’s the actual site as well.

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Whagon Wheel Route

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One of the web assignments I decided to do was the Google Maps Story for three stars.The basic premise of the assignment was to, “Use Google Maps to tell a story of historical or literary figure”. I did not follow the prompt exactly, and rather than tell the story of a historical or literary figure, I chose to tell the story told by Old Crow Medicine Show with their song “Whagon Wheel”.

You can view the lyrics here, but the song tells the story of a man fleeing the cold “up in New England” and heading towards his lady in Raleigh North Carolina. When creating the map, I used lyrics from the song that referenced each particular city.

View Whagon Wheel in a larger map