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

From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” 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.
Originally we recommended doing this using the Firebug extension in the Firefox browser, which does work, but is unfortunately easy to lose your work. We currently recommend Mozilla Hackasaurus — install the X-Ray Googles in any browser and use it to re-cast the content of any web page.
When you blog it, include both a screen capture in your post, but you will also need to upload the web files (HTML and media files) to your own site so it can exist as a stand alone URL. (see our older Firebug Tutorial)
Consider using news sites, social media profiles, product pages, movie review pages etc. The simpler the design of the page, the easier it will be (think Craig’s List).

This is a 5 star assignment

For this assignment I actually thought was was going to be really hard and I was worried about how I was going to get this assignment done.  The tutorial on hackasaurus really helped me though, and after figuring out what I was doing the hardest thing for me was deciding what kind of story I wanted to tell on the web.  While looking on amazon I came across the chicken soup for the soul books.  This got me thinking about how awesome would it be if there was a Chicken Soup book for the ds106 soul.  That is when I got the idea to use hackasaurus and the x ray goggles.  These tools make is really easy for me to hack the site.  I even used photoshop to create a new book cover for the Chicken soup for the soul.  After I got the hang of using the X-ray goggles it was really easy to add my own words on the website.  After that I then published my story and grabbed the html code and saved it to EditPad lite.  I then saved it as an html file and uploaded it to my blog.

Below are screen shots of my amazon page Chicken Soup for the ds106 Soul:

Here is the link to my amazon page on Chicken Soup for the ds106 Soul.