Delicious and Google Chrome

Most of you have heard by now that I figured out why my computer was acting squirrelly recently. Part of my hard drive (the part you don't want to mess with) went bad last week. The part that went bad was essentially the table of contents--that part of the disk that tells the interface where everything is located. I flipped out for a while because I thought I had lost a bunch of pictures and videos (irreplaceable family camping trips) that I hadn't backed up yet. Thanks to my husband's unceasing ingenuity, we were able to find an old recovery program that located the shadow copy and got all my personal files. We formatted the drive and things have been good since.

Following the loss of all of my cookies and internet history, I've finally started using Delicious. What an amazing difference this has made in my life, even just over the last 48 hours. Delicious is basically an online bookmarking service--you can make your bookmarks public or private, and you take them everywhere with you (even if your computer crashes, even if you are using a machine you haven't before) because it's all online and you just have to log in. Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?

Also, I'm now giving Google Chrome a whirl. I typically don't jump right on the bandwagon when new technologies come out, because there's usually a string of real world errors and problems that need correcting (think new game consoles, most Microsoft software, and the Volkswagen and Audi Flash of Death ). I let everyone else find these and correct them before I spend my hard-earned money. However, my husband loves Chrome and put it on my machine when we did the system restore, so now I'm using it and generally liking it. It's different. The biggest differences are the way bookmarking and favorites work, and the downloads bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen.

LI 802 Learning Group Project

For my LI 802 Learning Group Project, I decided to present my Expert Group research by creating an interactive website presentation.

http://sites.google.com/site/li802hcit/home

I tried to make the presentation as multi-modal as possible to accomodate all learning styles. I made a handout to accomodate the information on the site and the verbal presentation, and it is available for download from the resources page. I also put in a lot of links to extra resources throughout the presentation for active independent exploration, as well as some technology demonstrations.

Overall, the feedback from my group was very good--they enjoyed the presentation and seemed very pleased that I had taked such care to address all learning styles. In terms of Google Sites, I was most frustrated by the fact that the templates don't allow much manipulations of the headings, but I was very pleased with the final poduct.

I can honestly say I'm proud of my work on this one and happy that I took a risk by doing the project via a website--it expressed both my personal style, the presentation content and form, and contained and displayed a great deal of information for my group's later reference.

Wireframing

I started wireframing the first week of class because that's when I started doing some user interviews concerning what we wanted out of our site. All of the page direction outlines were done on scraps of whatever paper was available at the time and have been residing taped into my notebook for the last 2-3 weeks. Seeing as things are moving forward, and the lesson content on wireframming was posted, I thought it might be time to revisit the wireframing I had done and do some touch-ups and revisits concerning the interviews.

Looking at my scrappy do up, I thought it might be good to give Gliffy a go so I wouldn't lose my plans in a horrific coffee incident. So I got on, and I have to say, it's easier than any other electronic method of the sort I've tried when attempting web-type layouts. However, it still seems a little cumbersome for initial brainstorming sessions--I would still prefer the scribble and jot method for that. However, I would use it for final versions and presenting.

Drupal and Plone

I've just spent some time catching up on the rest of this week's lesson content and perusing through Drupal and Plone. My initial impressions of these sites compared to Joomla! is that Plone seems to have (for me, at least) the most intuitive layout. The site seemed to know where my thoughts were going in terms of the most prominently displayed links, and offered up easily accessible case studies and lists of hosting providers--I haven't decided yet if I'm going with a hosting provider or setting up one of our old boxes in the closet to do it myself. Probably the later because I tend to be a control freak.

I think Joomla! has the "friendliest" language in that it approaches the subject of CMS from a beginner's standpoint in the pages and documentation I found. Drupal's three-column layout was a little overwhelming at first, and it seemed that the menus kind of jumped around a little as I paged through and I got a little lost--however, Drupal also offered some readily available forums for the contributors which openly discussed problems and fixes.

I'm going to need to do a little more research before I pick one, I think, because I'm really looking for a CMS that would allow me more access to play with the "guts" (the back-end programming language). Ultimately, I think I'm going to spend some time looking through the case studies more to see how the final sites turned out. Aesthetics are important, and good layout potential is currently topping the list of "needs" for my friends' blog.

More Sites, terms, and Texts

From today's class:


New Text:

Krug, S. (2005). Don't make me think: a common sense approach to web usability. 2nd edition. New Riders Press.

isbn: 0321344758


New Tech Sites:

camptasia: screen recording software.

google docs: online document sharing.

microsoft surface: the desk computer with touch screen usability.

gliffy: a free diagramming (wire framming) online tool.

zoho: free online web applications (i.e. word processor, presentation tools, document management, etc.)

duvaga: media management system.


New terms:

mashup: the combination of new technologies into new services.

web service: info that's created elsewhere and brought into a web application (like a site that displays local weather via a widget they don't manage in house).

waterfall (project management): the "one step to the next" approach; leaves the majority of testing until the end.

agile (project management): the "all at once" approach; testing and communication are contsant and back and forth

cowboy (project management): the "my way, or the highway" approach; one person dominates, thinks they know everything, and demands things happen their way

streaming (video & audio): streaming media is being constantly received by the user, as opposed to a download that must be completely downloaded to the user before viewing.

metadata: quite literally data about data. For example, consider a collection of books as data; the metadata would be the things in the catalog (like titles, authors, isbns, number of words, etc.). For a group of people, metadata could be names, ages, heights, etc. For a collection of online sites, metadata could be number of visits per day, number of links, average frequency of update, etc.

It occurs to me that these lists of texts, sites, and terms should probably be compiled into single pages; I'm going to try to establish some static pages to display this information. (Or, if you happen to be currently enrolled in my class, find the online glossary of terms on Blackboard.)

Reflection on the Guest Speaker

Yesterday we had a guest speaker, Amanda, who talked to us about Information Architecture and the practical applications "in the trenches."

adobe connect -- the online conferencing software we used to meet with Amanda.

What struck me most about the presentation was that I never knew careers of this kind actually existed. At a job I used to work at, I was the primary designer of the text mining and semantic mapping strategies, including search functionality and interface design. I have some decent programming skills, but they weren't really sophisticated enough to complete the project on my own, so I worked with programmers to get things done. I had never considered this kind of work as information architecture--when I was working there, I don't think I even knew that term to apply it to what I was doing.

Since getting into my program for library science, I've had several experiences with librarians frustrated with the catalog search systems they have to deal with. The most frequent dissatisfactions seem to be that the design is cumbersome because there are too many search fields to do with, or the search fields/algorithms do not return the desired results. With my background in computers, I've been greatly influenced to try to solve this problem. Before the presentation I had been considering academic or special libraries, but I think I'm going to add information architecture to the list. Some of the companies out there designing software for use in libraries or by librarians seem to need more input on how the programs are used and the importance of a simple design that can achieve "Find It" results fast.

Technologies

cooliris.com -- this one allows you to view large lists of images at a glance.

twitter.com -- a social networking site that allows users to "follow" other users online and, possibly, through their phones. Users twitter what they are currently doing to their followers in 140 characters (letters and spaces) or less.

wordpress and blogger--online sites to host your blog. If you have a gmail account, your login information will be the same for blogger.

flickr--uses a process of folksonomy for users to assign their own tags. Uses a collective intelligence method to categorize all of the images on the site.

gettyimages -- uses a lot more time and energy to categorize their images (compare a search between flickr and gettyimages--flickr has more returned results, but they may not be as accurate; gettyimages returns less that are categorized on a stricter set of rules).

pandora -- pandora is radio online that uses an algorithmic approach to determining user preferences. You enter a song or artist that you like, and pandora will generate a list of artists or songs that you might like.