Don't Make Me Think

       You are probably wondering what that title is all about? After all, usually I just shout a bunch of techno babble at you that you probably need to look up. This time I can say without a doubt, will be completely the same.

       For this assignment I was forced against my will to read a packet and do worksheets, BLEH, and read about all of the things that make a good website.I didn't sign up for this, I signed up to mess around on a computer! But enough ranting, you want to hear all about what I did on the worksheets don't you.

       For starters I had to look for a website that was very distracting or it wasn't too obvious what exactly was going on. So after a while one was found that looked awful. It was called Partial Preterism and it really had no indication of what was important, all it did was throw a bunch of words on to a screen and tried to see what stuck.




A good example of a website that was the opposite of this was one called Background Burner. It was nice and simple and there wasn't anything really distracting about it, until you look around and see a sumo picture, I mean come on, you can't not look at a sumo picture.

So next was a terrible site where there is absolutely no indication of where to click until you look really hard and notice the lines underneath the links that are put in the middle of blue writing. If you are going to make a link make sure it is CLEARLY VISIBLE, otherwise it gets very irritating and confusing. Oh yeah, the website is called Liberty Van.

But on the opposite end of the spectrum is the center of the world wide web, The Website Center. It was a nice clean little website that actually showed you where you can click to go to other places. Thankfully you could tell because the links were together at the top.

So here is someone clever enough to make a website that shows everything wrong you can do with a website. It is horribly colored, the distractions on the website are too numerous to count, and the spacing on everything is abominable. This place is appropriately named The Worst Website Ever. This is an example of terrible spacing because I needed one and I couldn't use the same examples over and over.

 A great website with good spacing is none other that The Whitehouse Website, and I'm not just saying that to keep the feds away. It actually had good spacing and everything was clearly defined to where you could tell what was separate and what was together. I tried to think of other jokes I could put on here but I quickly got bored.




So, before I get into this one, here is some info you are going to need to know. Conventions are the use of an image to represent something under a different meaning, it has a synonym called symbolism. On the Walmart website (hehe, advertising) it has a shopping cart that represents the shopping you are doing on the site.





Finally, an awesome example of hierarchy, which is the showing of how something is important compared to everything else, was the site CNN.
 It had good example with different stories being more prominent that others.

That's it for this post, until next time,

Jake Smith

Random Websites

Hello people with nothing better to do than read my blog. I am back with another project that I worked like a whole 20 minutes on. What I had to do was look at sites and identify the "question marks," a question mark is the quick questions you don't even know you ask yourself when looking at a website because they are over very quickly. Mainly web creators use these questions to know what not to do on their website. For example...

 This website called Sunshine on Site was my first stop to finding other random sites. It didn't really work out so I put it on here. The main questions that came into my head was at first, where do I begin? There is both a menu and sidebar which made it very confusing to know where to find stuff. The other one I had was if that green button in the middle was clickable or not. It looked like a button but it could have also been a colorful title.

 Another wonderful website I found was the Passive Aggressive Password Machine. This site is pretty good if you are in the mood for a little confidence bruising as it will call you multiple names and hope that God has mercy on your email account. The main confusion with it was that all of the instructions were hidden under the green box at the top and it never said that you needed to roll the mouse over it to see them. The other thing is that unless it is explained to you you don't really know what to do until you see the directions.

And lastly, the Hotel Wifi Test which I didn't really look into that much because I was too bored with this to care. For starters it was sort of unclear that the pictures were links and you wouldn't know until you moved the mouse over the picture. Plus the fact that the menu at the top is so small that it is very difficult to see and have to actually look for it.

anyway there is my rant about three random websites.

until next time,

Jake Smith

The Paint Place

I have done it! I have finished my first client project!

Well... ok, so it was a fake client... Big deal! I still finished so that is at least something.

Anyway, yes i am back with another awesome website made by yours truly. This site is about all things paint for a guy I made up called Peter Painter. Pretty clever huh, i know, i'm so proud. But this site included what we have learned so far which meant we had to do it the hard way.

What we did was take a theme we liked from the list of themes given through Wordpress and rewrite some of the coding to make it our own. In other words it is another childtheme project. The name of the (fake) store is called The Paint Place. Isn't my teacher so creative and original? But all in all the actual product didn't turn out too bad. I used the theme called Kindergarten which was the closest to the look the "client" wanted for this site.

 This right here is my home page, it is two pictures because the screen capture wouldn't fit all of it in. On the home page it has a small little picture slideshow of random paint scenes, the Painter's Decree, and a link to comments put in by the users of the web (not really, those are just me).

 We had to include several pages that had to revolve around the idea that this was an actual site for an actual company. For starters there was an inspiration page that talks all about Peter's life and why he wanted to start the Paint Place. Nowhere, Oklahoma is an actual place, you need to search that up.

 This page we had to put in store locations, so a map of Kansas was put on the page with pushpins showing where all of the stores were located. The map even includes major highways and streets so you won't get lost.

Here we had to include a learning center page so I decided to make a program called the Paint Pals, i'm almost as clever as the teacher. It is a program for small kids where they can learn about paints and colors, but mostly to make sure that each child is happy with who they are and to accept that everyone should be themselves (except when you are yourself, then admitted to a psych ward). Because what child program doesn't teach that to kids right?

 Here is the brands page cut up in three parts. It shows all of the brands of paint that the store buys including themselves at the bottom because they mostly make their own paints. For this page I actually created all three logos in a span of about twenty-five minutes. You can probably tell that by the simplicity of them. But the three brands are Royal Paints, Rainbow Riders, and my favorite of the three Paintscape.

We also had to make a page called colors, so at first I tried to copy and paste the code for an interactive color wheel, but that ended horribly and greatly messed up the code. So instead I added a link to the site instead. It basically says the you can look at the color wheel and decide what colors you like, then you can go to the store and tell them the code for the color you are looking for.

This right here is the logo for the site which was the very first thing we needed to make. It was actually kind of fun to have to think up something from a simple idea as paint. There were some limits though; for instance we had to include the name of the company and it had to look "good" or something. All in all i'm actually very happy with how this site turned out.

Well, that is all I got for you right now

Until next time,

This is Jake Smith

The Wonderful World of Wordpress

       So in the huge world of my web class there has been some buzz of a little something called Wordpress. So of course the first thing you Noob coders may ask might be "What's Wordpress?" Well I will tell you that and so much more!!! (Because it's assigned)

       For starters there are two different types of Wordpress; there is .com and .org. Wordpress.com is a way for you to create a blog through Wordpress, where Wordpress.org is a "Well-Architectured personal publishing system," basically it lets you make a website. Wordpress was made in this world as an open source content management system and was actually based off another program called cafelog. In other words they are both a CMS or content management system as it was said above. 

       Wordpress is actually more common than what is first thought. It is actually used on a multitude of common and well known sites like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, The Official Star Wars Blog (Come on, I had to put it in.), and Variety. In fact, out of the top 10 MILLION websites of the words Wordpress is used on about 24.4% of them. You do the math, that is a lot of websites.

       Of course though, Wordpress is not the only CMS used. There are others including, but not limited to, Joomla and ModX which are also pretty popular in the CMS area of the web.

Well it looks like I have answered everything that I HAD to. If you would like to see where I got my info from you can click on the links below next to the corresponding questions.

What is the purpose of Wordpress.com?

LINK

What is the purpose of Wordpress.org?

LINK

How did Wordpress originate?

LINK

What is Wordpress based on?

LINK

What is a CMS?

LINK

What large, well-known sites use Wordpress as a CMS?
LINK

What percent of the top 10 million websites use Wordpress?
LINK

Name two more commonly used CMSs besides Wordpress.
LINK

Until the next assignment or unless I get bored and decide to talk about something worthwhile,

Jake Smith

I'm Back!!!

       Yes that's right I am back for another whole year of blog posts! Summer is over and i'm now back to the place of torture known as school, but I don't think it will be all that bad (yeah right). We have already been assigned a project which is basically what i'm showing right now. But enough about me, how about I tell you about the project.

       We had to take a subject and find a photo of it on four different free stock photo websites. The subject I chose (if you didn't already look at the pictures) was the horrible and creepy octopus of the land. It can make a silk web to ensnare it's victims. That's right the haunter of nightmares, the Spider!

       The four sites used were morguefile.com, pexels.com, gratisography.com, and unsplash.com. These all had amazing photos but it was a competition and i have cast the votes and chosen winners for the categories.

       The winner for the best photo goes on over to the website of PEXELS!!!! I mean come on, this is a pretty cool picture of a spider. That thing is downright frightening, and not to mention it must be huge. So yeah, here is the winning picture. Although it has some pretty cool pictures; unfortunately it didn't have that many photos so it was kind of sad to know it only offered six pictures and then a link to another website for more pictures.



       And now, the winner for the website with the most photos. A name that automatically makes you think of zombies... MORGUE FILE!!!! This website was pretty good and had variety of photos to choose from. It made it quite fun to see all of them and I would probably choose this site as a go-to site in the future. Plus the pictures there were really cool too.





       The easiest website to download from would have to be (Drums please) GRATISOGRAPHY!!!! This website unfortunately only had one spider photo and the search bar is confusingly on the bottom of the website and it takes you to a search engine. But it was an amazingly quick download which was pretty cool.

Finally the easiest website to search, and last but not least, the only one left... UNSPLASH!!!! Ok ok I know it isn't actually a spider. But it was the only one it had so therefore it is the best! Leave me alone! This website was actually the easiest to use because it had all of it's pictures in a line on the page and the search was actually for the website. Unfortunately it didn't have the pictures I was looking for.




Well there we go, four incredible websites for free photos and now you know my opinions of them.

Until next post,

Jake Smith

The Final Animation Post

       Well, here it is. Although I have had a lot of fun in this class and have done lots of cool things, this will be the last post for animation. I am moving on to bigger things and can no longer be held in this class.

       So for our Final project we had to team up with some friends and make a movie. But not just any movie, a blockbuster smash movie with all kinds of crazy effects. Just kidding, I mean this is high school, come on. Basically we had to make a movie using a green screen at least once and then use all of the types of effects we learned over the year. Which included using one 3D object made in Maya.

       What we first started off with was making an idea for the movie. Our original idea was making a robot fight, but later on it turned into super powers. Next we made this story board with such lovely pictures drawn by yours truly.  After that we went into the filming stage, where we began to film all of our shots. It took about a week to get all of our shots, and even then we still have one missing (we realized this after the movie was already made). The worst part about the filming was the Kansas weather where it was rainy when we started and then about 10 min. after we were done for the day it got nice again.

       Along the way I learned many things, for instance how to shoot mini blue spheres from my hand. Actually I learned that nothing will ever go the way you expect it to. We had to do certain scenes several times just to make sure we have the shot just right. I also learned that I now have more respect for movie makers because there job is stressful and hard to do. I learned that trying to make a fire beam is very hard work. It was also a learning experience when I was taught how to work a green screen.

       If I was to do this project differently I would definitely start with making sure the story is not so cheesy. I will admit that the story is not the greatest, but it's pretty good for high school. I would also make sure there are absolutely no shadows when doing the green screen. You can't really know how bad this is without actually experiencing it, but just trust me it's bad. We just covered it up with a dark image background. That is my friend Madison, the friend who is my sworn enemy in the movie is my other friend Tim. Click on his name to see his blog; Madison didn't want her blog on here.

       Something I would do the same would probably be the fact that it was fun while we were filming. Even though our scenes aren't the greatest, we still had a lot of fun doing it. I think that I will take a lot of the effects that I have learned how to do with me because they could work in a multitude of scenarios.

       All in all I would call this project done with and deserving a spot it all of the theaters of the world. But because i'm feeling nice, i'll let you watch it for free. (Click on watch)

Until I feel like typing again,

This is Jake Smith

The Final Web Post (at least for the year)

It is finally the end of the school year, i'm sure we are all very excited. As a final project we had to update our index page (Which you can see at www.eravensonline.net/students/674jrs22). Throughout all of this we put up some of the highlights of the year including a photo composition website, our own animated GIF's and so much more.











My favorite project would have to be the Real or Hoax site we did somewhere in the middle of the year. I have always loved the stories of myths and legends and read just about every available book there is on them. In this site we had to make pages for several stories and then show them all in a single website.

This summer I plan on going to a retreat called Stubenville. It is a great religious retreat where several churches come together to meet and deepen our faith for God. I also plan to hit the pool if it ever stops raining. Even though I will be doing that stuff I also plan to help out a little bit as well. There is a thing going on at my old elementary school where people can volunteer to make and then serve food for the kids who are unable to afford it during the summer.

Next year I plan to delve farther into Web Design. After taking it for a year i have found it to be very fun and would like to continue to do it. I also see as a small part of it, graphic design, so this way I can kind of learn two things in one class. Sure it isn't the main focus of the class but it is definitely needed when making a website. All in all this has been a pretty great year.

Until I feel like typing again,

This is Jake Smith