AjaHannah

So put on all your clothes.

I much prefer The Cavalier Daily's website to Harvard's or Seton Hill's. The three pictures are really attractive to the eye. There is a lot of white space, but that is ok with me. I'd rather there be white space than overcrowding with text. Everything bold or blue could be clicked on so color was used appropriatly.

"Below the fold" was a list of other links by placement in the paper even a picture of that day's/week's paper was up. So cool. The only thing I felt was strange was that I could not click on the pictures to link to the article.

This is a simple update/rearragement that the Setonian Online can probably do. It doesn't include the hard stuff like a slideshow or video. We don't even need more pictures than we had in the paper.

SO

I'm not going to bash The Harvard Crimson especially since they have a better website than we do. Here are some things I noticed (positive and negative):

• The site was text heavy
• Some pictures in slide were repeated at the bottom of the page if you scrolled down
• They had a slide show
• They "above the fold" part was done very well
• The "below the fold" was mostly short links
• It's constantly updated
• Many time more than one person is in the byline
• Their use of color pulls you to believe some things are links (like the time)

I wonder how they are able to do all these things (a bigger staff? a bigger lab? more funding? more dedication? different programs? bigger school?). The real question though is: "What the Setonian Online can feasibly take and apply?" I mean just look at Seton Hall's Setonian. There's no way ours is even on the radar.

SO

Comes creeping on so haunting every time... (Blink 182)

In "Porphyria's Lover" did the main character kill the girl? I feel that hid did. "In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around / And strangled her..." (367) But, why?

I'm missing a motive. I'm really unclear as to what's happened here. Could someone enlighten me?

I did like the rhyme sceme. It changes and there is no pattern (that I can find), but it still flows. It switches from abab to bbcb.

SO

"If you are able in such ways to distinguish a work's various situations from the writer's major idea or ideas, you will be able to focus on ideas and therefore sharpen your own thinking" (Roberts 121).

But aren't situations part of of the ideas? They lead to ideas...Morals are the ideas.

Really, I wanted talk about that quote on page 120, but so many people already did (and they said what I wanted to say) so it was pointless.

SO

"Luka, tell them in the stable not to give Toby any oats today" (Roberts 392).

I believe that Anton Chekhov's Mrs. Popov in "The Bear: A Joke in One Act" didn't really love her husband and wasn't in love with Smirnov either. She seems to be trying to spite her husband and one-up him by being more faithful than he was. As Carissa mentioned in class today, she had powdered her face and when she was talking to him (via a painting) she never mentioned anything more than a skin-deep attraction.

I believe Smirnov, being the first man to see her after her husband died, was what she attatched herself to. We mentioned in class that his rude, frankness pushed her to liking him. She was used to a liar so the other extreme was some sort of relief. Or it could be looked at the opposite way. She was used to someone mean to her so someone else that was mean reminded her of her husband. Vicious circle.

In any case, she doesn't say I love you back to him. She yells for him to get away from her before he kisses her. (I don't think he really loved her either, but that's another blog.)

SO

"'The hardest thing to do is to persuade a reporter that there simply is no big story here.' He said he was fully aware that politicians and others caught in embarrassing situations often resort to protesting that there is no story" (Haiman 57).

Journalists are supposed to be skeptical and I guess they get pulled into it. They get closed-minded, but I also feel some politicians/big business people just hate to get questioned.

I've been getting that lately with an article I'm investigating. I'm not going to go into details, but people keep telling me it shouldn't be a story and there is no story. Then, I tell them what I think and where the story is and they admit that "yea, there really is a story" except there is just part of it they don't want me to expose/go into depth/they feel it's private.

Maybe there is no big story, but there is a story. Framing is wrong, but it is also how we are guided to write (perhaps not outright). Write about the controversy because that's news so maybe make it a controversy.

SO

The garbage interactive media thing was interesting. I actually clicked through and read each of the slides before I discovered a video would pop up. My browser/service has been very slow lately. I actually enjoyed the information slide that you can click through more than the video. I felt I had all the information I needed without it.

Then again I suppose you should have some reporting with added to the mix so it doesn't just seem like an eco-informational website. I took the recycling path first. Not much to say. It was interesting to learn the process of where our trash goes, though I'm not sure where the actual news was or if this was a news site at all. I felt it was also missing numbers and facts like how many garbage sites are there in the US that actually convert methane to good use.

I can see how interactive media is effective in attracting and keeping audiences. Not everyone is textual. With unlimited space on the internet, why not bring in color, sounds, and motion. If you give the readers/users a chance to chose what they want to see also the power attracts them to keep coming back. After all, a hardcore Republican is not going to return to a site or newspaper that pushes only Democratic views.

SO

So when I opened wired.com it took me to this page and at first I was a little weirded out by the spiders, but I'm here to talk about the purpose of links on a page.

For this article, I found that the pictures also acted as links. These links not only link to more pictures, but the article changes underneath the picture. It's kind of like a text-game or an extended caption.

Links let you go to different pages for:

• more information
• definitions
• a similar story
• pictures/graphics/movie
• the next page of the story
• credits

But the great thing is that you don't have to click on them. If you don't need a definition or you don't want the rest of the story, you don't have to bother looking it up.

Students' Opinions

So I found that Intramural sports have actually been written a lot about by the Setonian, but not lately.

This article takes place in 04. Interesting, because there seems to be a similar problem still going on with the sports.

An article just about intramural basketball was in 06. I could research the improvement into a real team possibly and if it really worked.

Another 06 article talks about how the teams are pressed to find time and places to practice in the gym. Another school had a similar problem and wrote an editorial about it.

Interesting article about the return of sports on another campus after 70 years.

I think the lack of information about intramural sports/club sports on the Seton Hill main page, athletics page, Griffin's Lair, and GriffinGate really says something about the visibility of the sports. Currently, we offer only three competitive intramural sports (Flag football, sand volleyball, and ultimate Frisbee) and a lot noncompetitve activities.

Many of the websites listing SHU's intramural activities were outdated. Other student papers wrote about the lack of space for intramural sports, but that isn't the problem here.

The online New York Times section on New Cars came as a surprise to me. It seemed like an advertisement more than an article because the pictures shown would be like ones that appear in a TV segment. Only there wasn't some information crowded onto the screen about where to purchase it. It also reminded me of the Auto section of a newspaper. I think this is a visually pleasing, updated way to present an old bit of information.

Though I don't know much about Markets and stock, the page was interesting because it was up to the minute. It changed as soon as there was a change to report.

And since we all know about Twilight, I decided to look at this article that combined text, hyper links, and video. If you get bored by the article or want to check out information, it's just one click away. It even had a link to an old movie "Into the Wild" that Kristin Stewart was in.

Students' Opinions