Week 13 Assessment and Review

So what have we covered for the semester??

This semester we have investigated multitude of applications and the specific technology they employ, this includes social networking devices and techniques. This has culminated in the construction of a functional website.

The website has 5 separate pages which include:

• original text and original images that were compiled and shot on film
• a page which generates an RSS feed
• an RSS feed subscription to my own MPI104 Blog and the MPI104 course blog
• working links between all pages
• a home page
• an up-counter

Content wise, in order to increase the interestingness of the page for myself and others included material that appeals to me such as links to various external websites, my personal blog, delicious and my flickr account. The regular uploading of text and images to flickr, utilisation of delicious as a transitory bookmarking tool and commenting on peers blogs instilled good work ethics around the need for continual site maintenance. This reiterates the notion of continuous development the of Internet.

Really Simple Syndication commonly abbreviated to RSS is a method of sharing or publishing frequently updated works. The type of sites that are utilising RSS include news, blogs, audio and video. It allows users to be informed of this information update without actually having to visit the site. Updates can be linked to a central site such Google reader or any other frequently used blog. There is no limit to the number of RSS feeds that can be linked. This technology has provided time efficiencies for users.

Counters are, when related to digital logic, a mechanism that stores and displays the number of times that a particular event has occurred. This type of counter is an up-counter (increment counter) which increases in value. The rationale for the use of an increment counter in web design would be to actually log the number of times that a page is viewed. This could then be utilised as part of a marketing strategy or analysis of a web design project during research phase.

File Transfer protocol (FTP) is a method by which files may be shared over a computer network such as the Internet. To make use of FTP the user must have access to a server in order to upload and download files. The main objectives of FTP are:

• to promote sharing of files (computer programs and/or data).
• to encourage indirect or implicit use of remote computers
• to shield a user from variations in file storage systems among different hosts.
• to transfer data reliably, and efficiently.

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a method of producing and altering web pages quickly and easily. It mainly focuses on those pages written in HTML and XHTML. It allows the user to change the overall layout of a web page without altering the actual content. This is done by keeping the document content and document structure separate.

Templates do not allow the change of any content displayed on the web page. Major changes such as font, font size or colours may only be changed to individual specification through HTML edits. Some aspects of the actual layout are limited when using CSS. An example of this is highly graphical backgrounds where the lack of variables restricts the ability to "change all" or where structure is limited to rectangular shapes.

HTML is a mark up language that is utilised in the construction of Internet sites, via

Overall it has been an extremely informative semester covering various fundamentals which will provide a solid basis to which further multimedia skills can be developed.