Faulty Wiring

Evergreen proposal

2009-04-07T15:28:51Z

What is your angle?
Freshmen often suffer from depression. But how serious is the problem? How many students are depressed but just put on a brave face because they don't want negative attention? What are some serious ways that students who don't want to open up to other students can deal with depression? This article is more about the number of students who are depressed, rather than the causes of or dealing with depression.

Whom can you interview by next week?

Current freshmen
Other students willing to talk about their freshman year
RA's

Whom else are you interested in interviewing for the story?

Guidance Counselors
Professors
Wellness center

What are you considering for your sidebar?

Methods of dealing with depression
Causes of depression

Setonian Online Review

2009-04-03T00:40:47Z

I like the look of the new proposed Setonian Online for the most part, though I am worried that it's a bit generic. I mean, it's obviously an improvement over what we have now, but I think it is too cluttered and there's nothing that really catches the eye. It would be fine as a placeholder, but I don't see anything there that would make users want to keep coming back. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a little old-fashioned. I'd really like a modern, possibly minimalist layout. But that's just my personal preference, and probably wouldn't fly with everyone else.

The griffin on the header looks a little stretched out, but I'm not sure if that's just my monitor. I've viewed it on a few different machines, though, and I'm pretty sure it's a little warped or just too large. That could probably be easily fixed, though.

TL;DR: Too much text, not enough space. Colors are a bit drab, though they'd match Mom's living room.

2009-02-17T03:38:11Z

I'm lazy, so I woke up at ten on Sunday morning. I had received two text messages from the campus security alert system, about twenty minutes apart. One ordered all students to stay in their buildings, and the other said that campus was now safe. They had been sent at around eight AM, rather late in the game, as it turned out, and no one in my suite seemed to know what had happened. My mind instantly went to a shooting. Every few months, it seems, there's an announcement of a fatal shooting on a college or high school campus somewhere in America. Seton Hill, I figured, was next.

Facebook was full of confused status messages, but I finally got an instant message from a friend who claimed to know what had happened.

Do you really, or are you just being silly? I asked. She told me that her roommate's best friend had been a few houses away from the incident, and explained to me what we all now know. The police had been forced to shoot a young man after attempting to talk him down for hours. The information was later confirmed by my RA, Seton Hill's press release, and the Tribune review.

I looked at Joe Briggs' facebook page (which has since been closed to non-friends). By Sunday afternoon, it was brimming with heartfelt comments from an array of Seton Hill students, and even one of the coaches. Someone with that many people speaking up for him obviously isn't a deranged killer. I did have mixed feelings about the profile picture, which showed Briggs holding a what seemed to be a hunting rifle. Normally, I wouldn't have given the image a second thought. It just seemed sickeningly ironic.

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Grey and Gone

2009-02-17T03:01:41Z

I'm not going to lie. I can't examine three award-winning journalistic projects and then look at the website for our student paper, the Setonian, and not say it pales in comparison--literally. The primary colors here are shades of grey with a touch of teal. It's boring. It looks like something designed for old people.

I think it would be really easy to brighten up the Setonian pages. Using the school colors, red and gold, would probably work well if done tastefully. The designer would have to be careful to not completely overwhelm the readers with color, because the primary concern should still be readability, but there's no reason why we have to be so dull. Or, we could take things in a totally different direction. For example, note how the New York Times makes a black and blue layout work. The key component, I think, is the blue hyperlinks. The bright color, as opposed to our drab teal, pops out on the screen.

Another thing I took issue with regarding the Setonian Online includes the text, which all seems to be a few centimeters over to the left. It's just odd, and it can probably be fixed by someone who knows CSS. In the same way, there are huge gaps between story headlines and the text itself. The grey boxes at the bottom of the page that any "related links" appear in are drab, too. The header is a splotchy, almost unrecognizable picture of the side of what I assume is one of our buildings that fades into a bar of solid grey. I see nothing here that suggests this website is a newspaper.

But do you know what the worst part of our layout is?

It doesn't look too much different from this.

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Wall Street Journal or LiveJournal?

2009-02-10T05:16:40Z

I understand perfectly what sorts of stories belong in newspapers and what sorts of stories belong on your personal livejournal. But I got to thinking about how that line sort of blurs when you deal with smaller, local papers. I know back home, we've got this tiny little paper that sure enough puts out stories on the same importance level as ladies who bake pies. I'm not saying it's a good paper, but it still manages to stay in business. So that must mean there are people out there who read all those little mundane stories as a matter of civic pride (they're probably not my target audience, though).

I've never met anyone who I think would want to write such boring things, so I'm going to assume that we all hope to do better if/when we become journalists. I'm a creative writing major, but I'm pretty certain that I have the skills to be a journalist if I needed to. Will it count against me if I don't have a degree in it?

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"Emotions of the Sources"

2009-02-10T00:29:53Z

I have written for a newspaper in the past, but the things I wrote were pretty much opinion pieces. (I don't think they trusted me with real news). I've always thought of journalism as boring, to be perfectly honest, though I guess it depends on who you're writing for. Writing for The New Yorker is probably a lot more fun than covering the homecoming game in some rural town that no one's ever heard of, but I haven't done either of those things so I can only assume.

But to be perfectly honest, reading the English Essay vs. News Story guide doesn't make journalism look as bad as I thought it would be. Just because you're not allowed to talk about yourself doesn't mean it has to read like some dry instruction manual. Anything worth putting in a newspaper would probably be in there because it had some kind of emotional impact on someone, right? So I guess our job would be to make all those readers out there feel it, too.

If that's possible.

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Tomorrow's News

2009-01-31T02:16:47Z

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. --End Times

Referring to a newspaper or magazine's website is much easier than going down to a newsstand and picking up a copy--not to mention cheaper. Why would anyone pay for a subscription when they can just hit a bookmark and get all the same information without paying a dime?

When we buy a magazine or newspaper, technically we're not even paying for the news. We're paying for the paper it's being printed on. The company that owns the paper makes its real money from its ads. If paper is taken out of the equation, it's not that big a deal, as long as the ads are preserved, according to TIME magazine.

Whether that can actually happen or not is questionable. It would be more than a little ambitious for anyone to attempt to compete with eBay, Amazon, or craigslist. But websites do make money by hosting banner ads, and it probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch for a paper to host some of them. In fact, a large website, like the one that belongs to the New York times, gets so much traffic that one could presume that a potential advertiser would be willing to pay just as much for a banner ad as they did for a box in the old paper.

Whether this would actually work out in the long run or not is uncertain. However, with more and more papers going out of business each year, the news industry must adapt, or it will be washed away by the sea of bloggers and companies that did move with the times.

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Final Project Report

2008-12-08T04:58:33Z

After much agonizing, I decided to keep the layout of my project the way it was originally. This was a Writing for Internet class, after all. I didn't want to spend an undue amount of time on the layout and not get a chance to work on the story itself. Plus all the changes I made just wound up looking stupid. I'm not too annoyed, though. It's readable, and I think it encourages the viewer to focus on the prose.

I added a character list, at the suggestion of my beta testers, as well as just did some general editing as far as the text went, plus cleared up some spelling errors. I also cleaned up my FAQ pages, making them shorter and more helpful at the suggestion of Dr. Jerz. I'm really happy with the finished product.

So, what is the finished product? I hate talking about my own writing, so I'll keep this short.

Shaundie is a story set in the year 2100, and it follows the misadventures of a sixteen year-old clone of a pop star after her "mother" dies and leaves her with no money...and no legal rights. She moves in with her aunt, for lack of anywhere better to go, and deals with things like virtual realities, oppressed cyborgs, and insane computer hackers who enjoy extreme hoverboarding on their days off until her lawyer finally gets back to her.

When you're reading, you can follow the main character's story, or the stories of the three other side characters. Admittedly, there aren't very many pages for the side characters because I was only able to write the first half of the story, but they still exist. As an additional helpful thingy, each page is labeled with the date and time. Pay attention to them if you get lost. The story is not in chronological order.

Okay. Enough babbling. Here we are. Presentation day. If I haven't terrified you yet, check it out.

The End, for now

2008-12-05T03:45:21Z

I've made more progress than I ever expected to this year. Looking back, I'm amazed at how much I crammed into one semester.

I didn't do any blogs other than the required ones this time, simply because my term project was so big that I barely had time. I'll be honest, when I wrote my alpha report, I wasn't sure if I was going to finish on time.

I guess my interest in hypertext fiction began when we read The Heist, which I talk about in my initial term project report as being the main inspiration behind my final project. As soon as that was in my head, I think my term project was starting to form. I was also influenced by the University of Yellow Wallpaper and The Body. The climax came when I did an extensive in-depth analysis of several pieces of electronic literature.

It hasn't all been hypertext, of course, though I'll go to a great distance to drag creative writing into anything. In the beginning of the year, (and I'm most proud of this, I think) I spent a lot of time speculating about human communication, behavior, and the effects that blogging and the information age in general might have on languages and laws. Alex and I had a particularly good discussion about the future of our language, something that's always been important to me.

I was able to experience the creative side of writing for internet with text adventures and IF games. While I was really excited to finally code my own IF game, I didn't get to explore the medium as much as I'd have liked to. Maybe over the summer, if I'm feeling particularly motivated. Who knows?

I also finally learned how to use CSS, thanks to Castro, and Kilian's instructions have made sure that my paragraphs are noticeably shorter, and my blog entries sound less and less like raving livejournal entries every day. Or so I hope.

I edited Wikipedia, something I'd never have had the courage to do if I wasn't being graded on it. I remember how I was terrified that I'd bring down the wrath of a thousand angry admins who had nothing better to do than watch the Feral Parrot article and smite anyone who tried to make changes.

I've done my best to give feedback to my classmates as they struggle through their projects. I've given feedback to Dani's project as it transformed, because I've been sitting next to her the whole time, and I tested Jed's game and Aero's site when they was still in the early stages. I also gave some feedback to Aja and Jessie, which I'm pretty proud of myself for. I'm sure I did more but, once again, my comments are nowhere to be found because I'm a wreck.

Well, I think that just about covers it!

<3, Christina

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Alpha Report

2008-11-18T22:46:33Z

So, on Monday I played around with Jed's don't-blow-up-the-place game and Dani's Italian hypertext adventure. Jed and I talked about some things he needs to add into his game, because there wasn't much for me to do yet, but I suck at puzzle games, so I probably won't be the best tester even when there is more to do.

Dani's hypertext reminded me a ton of The Body, which I'm pretty sure it was inspired from. Sometimes it got a little confusing, but I'm sure she'll be up for hours rectifying any flaws, real or imagined.

Getting their feedback on my own hypetext project made me realize some important things. I'm going to have to make some cuts. See, my entire reason for writing it was to prove I can write a readable, enjoyable story using hypertext as a medium. I haven't given up on that. But I'm at two sections, which equal sixty "nodes", which equal 14,000 words. At this point, to finish the story would be at least another ten thousand words, because section three was meant to be 7,000 words and the conclusion, section four, was meant to be 3,000. That's not looking like a realistic goal.

At this point, the best thing I can do is improve the existing text--instructions, hyperlinks, and prose, for the most part. I would like to finish the story in the future, but not now. I don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity, and I know that's exactly what would happen if I mindlessly pursued the story with no regard for the readers. I'd have a gigantic, unreadable spiderweb. Which was the exact opposite of the entire point of this project.

I don't think I've failed. Dani jokingly said she'd like to read my story all the way through someday...if she had five hours to spare. I've already created something of merit. Maybe I'll write the conclusion over Christmas break, or for another class in the future. I'm certainly not done with the story yet.

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Hypertext Fiction Report

2008-11-14T00:46:39Z

My project is a rather lengthy bit of hypertext fiction based on my latest novel-length work. Unlike 90% of our class (from what I could tell from the blogs), I actually really like hypertext fiction. I like the different way of telling a story, and I think it is possible to have a "readable" piece if the writer puts in enough effort.

Even though I was disappointed in Sorrells' The Heist, it was the primary inspiration for this project. I have a few ideas that would improve Sorrells', such as tagging each page with the date and time to give a somewhat linear feel to a fundamentally nonlinear story, as well as color-coding the pages according to which character/story arc it is following.

The fact that I will put a great deal of care into telling the story itself will also be an improvement on Sorrell's design, because I think that is where he fell short the most.

I'm really happy with how my project is coming so far. I don't really have any problems to report yet. The HTML itself is pretty simple stuff, just links and the banner on top that links back to the main page in case the reader gets hopelessly lost.

The only occasional problem springs up when I lose track of the pages and it all turns into a mess, like a broken spiderweb. For the most part, I keep to my "map" and things go well.

For anyone who is for some reason curious about this thing, I uploaded a demo version of the first fifteen "pages" or so, I think they're actually called nodes. You can see it here (Please don't! It sucks! I haven't even added all the timestamps yet!)

The story doesn't even remotely resemble science fiction at this point, but it is, with AI's and computer hackers and everything. The first segment just happens to be narrated by a spoiled drama queen who has no idea that the story isn't actually about how many pairs of shoes she owns.

If you still want to read it, I seriously suggest waiting for the alpha test, when it will be less suckish.

If anyone has any general suggestions, go for it! I'm open to any ideas. What have you disliked most about hypertext fiction that we've read in class? What do you wish the writers had done differently?

Here's what everyone else is working on.

Quality over Quantity

2008-11-12T15:14:06Z

Well, here we are, portfolio number three. Man, this year has gone by so fast. For some reason, I don't think I have as many blogs this time around. I know I did them all. I guess we spent more time on the IF games than we actually did blogging. I definitely prefer that.

For you newcomers, this is just a list of all the noteworthy blogs I've done in the last month or so for my Writing For Internet class. So note them.

Coverage: Just like last time. There are so many listed here because this is the way I generally set up all of my blogs.

Timeliness: A little better this time. I'm pleased, overall. Still not perfect. I know I need to work on not putting everything off to the last second. It's a personality flaw or something. I'm sure it can be fixed with medication.

Interaction: It could always be better. I just have a terrible memory and am unreliable when it comes to replying to my comments. Well, practice will make perfect.

Usability Stupidity generated some conversation
Jessie and I debated whether Wikipedia should continue to exist or not on Feral Parrots and Other Birds

Depth: Deep, deep, deep. So deep you need diving certification and those silly flippers. I'm pleased to notice that I've continued to write "deeper" on my own, without being told to in the assignment. What can I say? Some days I just feel chatty.

Discussion: These are so hard to keep track of, seriously...I'm positive that there are more, but I cannot find the links. I'll need to start making notes to myself whenever I participate in a conversation.

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Don't Make Me Review!

2008-11-12T14:10:12Z

I didn't dislike Krug's Don't Make Me Think, but I didn't love it as much as some of the rest of my classmates. It wasn't badly written, and it didn't have any big glaring errors/points I didn't agree with, but I'm not going to keep it under my pillow or anything

I think Krug did a very good job of writing a book that will appeal to the largest audience possible, which is also (according to practically everything else we've read so far) a good idea for website design. In more than one of my blogs, I know I wrote that the book itself could become a website, just because of the way it is laid out. But no one would make any money that way.

Sometimes while I was reading, I felt kind of like Krug was repeating what he'd said in the previous section, or it was the same exact ideas applied to a different area of the web. I get the feeling that this is more of an "adult-book" (though not to the extent of Writing for Web), and it would probably be great for businesses. But I would have benefitted from some excerpts highlighting the main ideas more than slogging through the whole thing, I think.

Krug did a great job explaining usability testing (or maybe that was Jerz. Hmm...). He explained it in a way that didn't make it sound scary, time-consuming, uber-expensive, or only for the elite. Honestly, I know I will usability test a website of my own sometime in the future. I have no idea when, I just know I will. I honestly can't imagine designing a website without one.

The only things I would suggest is just maybe updating some of the images. I know some of them just came off really dated (because they are). (the parenthesis need to stop now). The cute comic strips are fine, but the websites featured in the book have either been updated long since the book was published, or have gone offline altogether.

Here are the blogs I kept while reading:

Usability Stupidity

He Could Have Made it a Website

The Lone Advantage

Krug, Chapters 9-11 (Apparently I wasn't feeling creative that day)

Lucky 12

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Feral Parrots and Other Birds

2008-11-10T02:39:00Z

So I did my wikipedia edits this morning. I think finding an article that I had the skills (and inclination) to edit actually took more time than the edits themselves. What saved me was this page, which is a (somewhat outdated) list of some of the worst articles on the website. Some were so far gone that I didn't even know how to begin to help them.

Eventually I settled on this article, which is about the novella "The Birds". A lot of the formatting was messed up, some sources were not cited, and the synopsis was almost unreadable. I fixed the formatting (easier than it looks!), cited at least one of the sources already referenced (I felt so smart when I figured out how to cite, too), and completely rewrote the synopsis (which took almost two hours). At the end, I felt like I'd really accomplished something, even though the article is still far from perfect.

I took a break from all that thinking, then returned and edited this article, Feral Parrots. "Feral whats?" you ask. Don't laugh at me. Most of the problems with this article were also related to formatting, as well as tone. The entire article was very opinionated and informal. I tried to fix as much as I could, but without cited sources, I couldn't completely fix the work of the original writer. The most I could do was add {{citation needed}} all over the place.

I came back tonight to see if anyone had reacted to my changes. They didn't. Heck, I'm willing to bet money that nobody even looked at the articles at in the last nine hours. I don't know how I feel. Relieved that no one has freaked out and flamed me, but also a little let down that no one has acknowledged that I spent hours revising articles about a bunch of stupid birds. I'll keep looking, though, and update if anything changes. I doubt it will. It's not like I edited articles anyone cares about, like Oprah or John McCain or Sailor Moon.

I would never be a Wikipedia editor. I already have enough essays to write for class.

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The Great Unknown

2008-11-08T18:34:14Z

For this part of the assignment, I took a look at the Cyberpunk wikipedia article. I'm already somewhat familiar with it, but I'd never clicked on "edit" before. What greeted me was a confusing box of code that I think I sort of understand, but probably need more practice with before actually editing anything. In any event, this article is really good, so I'm not going to be touching it any time in the near future.

There was also a notice asking would-be editors to make an account instead of just making changes. I can see why. If I was in charge of wikipedia, I'd make it manditory to have an account before editing. But that's just me.

My favorite part was at the bottom of the edit page. It reads as follows:
Please note: If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it.

Basically, if you don't have anything smart to say, shut up and go away. I'm not feeling so comfortable with the idea of editing an article anymore. Though there are always those stubs. No one cares about those.

I also checked out the revison history. It looked like the only recent changes were pretty minor, along with some vandalism, which was reverted pretty quickly.

The discussion page was kind of amusing. I counted at least four topics that basically boiled down to "IS THIS CYBERPUNK???" Usually the answer was no. There was also the occasional "Who the hell wrote this stupid paragraph?"

Also, people really need to sign their comments. Four tildes, people, it's not hard.

I then ventured over to Seton Hill and St. Vincent's wiki articles. They're both pretty short, but still have a fairly good amount of information for schools of their size because, let's face it, we're not at Harvard.

Both articles start with the history of the schools, which were boring, so I didn't read them. Seton Hill's page then list all those random campus programs we have, plus grad programs, and notable alumni. St. Vincent had only two sections, Traditions and Notable alumni. Seeing as that was boring as all heck (But hey! That's a nice basilica, St. V), I went to the discussion and edit pages to see if there had been any drama lately.

Seton Hill's discussion page had a whole one discussion going on, where some anon complains about a misattributed quotation. Apparently no one cared enough to reply. There hadn't been many interesting edits lately, either. I guess we're not even interesting enough to vandalize.

The only talking going on over at St. Vincent was by what appeared to be a bot who took down an image that violated some fair use laws. I find the idea that Wikipedia has computer programs that can make simple changes by themselves kinda cool. I have no idea how advanced these things are (probably not very).

Most of the changes on the history page were minor, and the only thing worth mentioning was a reversion with the note "Wikipedia is not the news." I compared the new and old versions to see what was so offensive, and found a little note about a recently won football game. God forbid.

My goodness, that was boring. It's time for a break.

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Faulty Wiring

Evergreen proposal

Setonian Online Review

Next

Grey and Gone

Wall Street Journal or LiveJournal?

"Emotions of the Sources"

Tomorrow's News

Final Project Report

The End, for now

Alpha Report

Hypertext Fiction Report

Quality over Quantity

Don't Make Me Review!

Feral Parrots and Other Birds

The Great Unknown