This week we didn’t have any required article to read. Instead, we were instructed to begin working on our final projects for the course. This week, I started to study Twine, the computer program that allows you to create interactive stories.
This week in our course Digital Authoring Practices, we began brainstorming and wrote our proposals for our final project. I had a lot of fun looking over everything we’ve studied this semester to determine what exactly I would be creating as my final project object. After being intrigued by the Twine game Depression Quest, I knew I wanted to create an interactive story that would keep the reader interested at a greater level than a normal short story because of the user’s ability to alter the life and events of the protagonist.
This week, our class read about writing for your audience. Basically, this means writing content and designing your site to match the preference of the ideal reader or user. I connected this to the creation of my own website at tayloruntamed.com, where I’ve used similar methods to attract readers who will be likely to return and become consistent followers of my material. To start, I will discuss the importance of tailoring content for your ideal reader.
This week, we learned about “aleatory poetry” which is basically writing that is created at random. This can look very different depending on how you choose to write it. On one hand, you can choose to make random words and phrases to make sentences that are diverse if not completely unrelated. You can also create diverse storylines or endings of the same story.
Because this week’s article was over Twine, a unique online programming platform allowing for the creation of interactive games and novels, I thought it would be appropriate to write about my experience and reflection playing one of the games linked in the article: Depression Quest.
This week, we learned about Hypertext and the ways you can use Twine to create interactive novels and games. I chose to play Depression Quest and got totally sucked up in the game.
Transitioning from CSS to this week’s material was a challenge. Since most of my classmates and I are still working to style our websites with this new programming language, I think most of us were overwhelmed with the ideas presented in this week’s article. Nonetheless, I found the information interesting and helpful for my future editing and improving my blog page.
This week, my classmates and I had to style our websites using CSS, a programming language that works with HTML to edit the stylized elements of a web page.
This week in our ENGL 460 course, my classmates and I were introduced to CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. This is a programming language that supplements HTML, allowing us to style our websites any way we’d like.
This week, our assigned reading focused on the use of style in our blogs and how to implement it within each file (to our text and general layout). Rather than HTML, a programming language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to edit the style of elements within a file.
This week, our focus was metadata and we learned about how this code, inserted before the body of the article, can be important in implementing different tools for our blogs. The example we did in class was adding a list of categories for our blog post and then linking that list to our new menu.
This week while reading and learning about the details of writing in both Markdown and HTML, I found a video on youtube.com that was very similar to our own reading for the week: What is HTML? HyperText Markup Language Explained.
Week 4 Reflection
This week in the reading “What is Data?” we learned about different data structures commonly used in blogs. Specifically for blogs, this typically includes lots of text scalars (blocks of text, titles, subtitles, etc.). But it can also include other lists and dictionaries (for visualizations, pictures, and more).
For the Card Picker, I think a list of dictionaries is used. The list contains 4 items (James Stuart - Training Manager, Isaac Pullman - Creative Director, Sarah Oscar - Sales Rep, Srinivas Tamada - Tech Lead). Within each item in this list is a dictionary of four keys (phone number, home town, main role, photo). The phone number is a number scalar. The home town is a text scalar. The main role is a longer text scalar. The photo is a blob. I think this is an effective visualization. It makes it easy to see the information of each employee without getting mixed up with the others. To do less clicking, you could simply have a table or page where all the information is shown without having to press each person. But I think this way allows you to have interaction with each member.
Howdy!