assessment 2 summary

Term 2 has seen the introduction of a few more things to mpi104. These include FTP's, technorati, the use of iWeb, fetch, using page counters and RSS feeds.

To begin summarising mpi104 over the semester I'll list changes that have happened since the assessment 1 post:

• My flickr account now has 83 photos on it
• My del.icio.us account now has 54 bookmarks
• My mpi blog now has 14 posts including this one.
  

Blogger...well, as you already know, this subject pretty much lives hand in hand with blogger. We post all our information on it and 'experiment' with aspects we're learning such as RSS and links. My blogger page consists of my weekly posts, some extra ones, links to my athene page, flickr page and del.icio.us page. There is also an RSS feed to the mpi class blog as well as the Sydney Morning Herald, Google Reader and my athene page. The athene one updates as new albums are created on my site. I've recently put up a visitor counter, a YouTube video feed, technorati link and links to the labels I've used in my posts...i think that's it! Throughout the semester I've made changes to my page using HTML (which we learnt a bit about), most recently changing my header with a pic. I've played with fonts and colours too but changed a lot of them back to the original. Blogger's been a good way to post work, I use it in GRP224 as well and have found it really useful for that.

Flickr has been pretty easy to use. I don't know what I'd use if for out of this subject though. Maybe displaying works. I look at most peoples photos on facebook. Anyway, I've become friends with people on there, some I even went to school in the UK with so it's been good to see their pictures. I've labelled all my photos and even discovered 'notes'.

Gmail and Google documents were a big aspect too. I started using google docs on my other blog too but lately have just been using the blogger interface. It's quick and simple. Recently we were introduced to Google Reader which is pretty much a giant RSS feed of all your favourite sites. I knew about it before we looked at it but it didn't interest me.

This brings me to RSS feeds. Pretty much a way of receiving updates from sites in a simple way/format. I've been using them for quite a while now and have 4 on my blog as stated above. I've also put one on my athene page linked to my mpi blog. Adding the RSS feed onto the site was a little annoying as I had to get the link converted to JavaScript first, which took some looking into.

I honestly don't use del.icio.us at all. I put links on there but it hasn't been useful at all to me, everything I do is from this computer and therefore stored on here. It's a heaps good idea though!

Technorati is pretty much a blog search engine. It is different as all the data is live, like a blog is because they are constantly updated. It allows people to see where their blog is ranked. Mine has changed significantly since day one. For some reason it's gone from 4,978,471 to 10,280,622 and i STILL have no authority! There must have been a mistake with the original number I got.

Inserting page counters to our blog and athene site was looked at so we could understand our site traffic eg. when most people log on. All forms of data can be logged so people can understand their site users better and cater for them more effectively.

iWeb, athene, FTP and fetch all work together so here's a summary on them all! We learnt about FTP and how we could upload to the uni FTP server using fetch. Fetch allows us the connect to the athene server, which we can then drag and drop files (our website) onto...simple! I created my website using iWeb. It's pretty user friendly and comes with a fair few templates. I used one but modified it a little and added my own stuff.

counters and rss...

Counters keep track of visitors to sites. When a person visits, the counter goes up one digit. They can be in the form of plain old simple counters, invisible counters and counters that log data on visitors.
They are useful because they allow sites to know who/when and if people are visiting.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. Essentially it is an easy way to subscribe to information from websites. That way updates to the sites/itunes/email are sent to you without visiting the site. You receive headlines, allowing you to see the updates whihc you can then choose to view should you want to.

technorati

Today we looked at the website technorati. Essentially it is a search engine for blogs like this one however it is so much more than that. They monitor the world of blogs or weblogs and allow people to search fresh information about everything imaginable on the web. It gives real time up to date info as it searches something they call the Live Web. When searching the internet using something like google, the searches are generally static and inactive. Technorati is 'connected' to the blogosphere and is notified of new content as it happens, therefore letting you know what, when and where things are happening, who and when they were said and how it may impact you.

My technorati rank is: 4,978,471
My authority on technorait is: ZERO - don't have any.

I guess in the coming weeks this site will become more useful, at the moment i'm not too sure what it's gonna do for me.

changes #2

So i got pretty bored again before and decided to make a few changes, here they are:

• changed my header using an image off my computer
• uploaded a pic for my profile
• put in a visitor counter to the right - was down the bottom but looked stupid
  
• label links down the right hand side
• and some youtube links to random pixar movies cos they're good!

Wow!

b.o.r.e.d. - put website up

So im pretty bored right now so thought I would put a link up to my mpi website. There really isn't anything on there yet but meh. I also figured out you can run two websites off the server so I've set another one up for grp223 but haven't put it up yet. Anyway, cool beans. CYA!

ftp - how excitement

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network eg. internet.
Essentially, it is a method of transferring files over ant TCP/IP based network. This allows users to use/alter files on other computers on that network, regardless of the operating system.
Using FTP has its advantages:

• It promotes the sharing of files
• It shields users from Variations in file storage systems among different hosts (all data can be accesses o matter what formats are used)
• Data can be transferred reliably and efficiently.
  

It does however have its downfalls and risks too:

• Eavesdroppers can pickup on file contents and passwords as they are sent in clear text, this can be minimised using secure connections such as SSL.
• It is a high latency protocol
• No data integrity check is performed at receivers end - data may be corrupt.
• The original ftp is a relatively insecure method of data trasnfer as there is no method for data encryption. The risks can be minimised using "either SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol), or FTPS (FTP over SSL), which adds SSL or TLS encryption to FTP."

Hope u enjoyed my riveting report. BYE!