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Apr. 21st, 2014 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI finished at least a draft version of the website for my cartography and GIS class.
I guess I'm a little embarrassed by it. I say that for several reasons. I can see myself writing a travel guide. But if I did, it wouldn't be like this.
First, it's not a very good travel guide. It doesn't need to be because the primary point of the project is to show that we can make halfway decent looking maps and put them in a web page.
The reason for that is that the professor thinks that hypertext and the internet are critical ways to communicate information in GIS systems. As much as GIS is about collecting and displaying data, it's also about communicating that data to other people in accessible, understandable ways. That makes sense, and I like that point of view.
But with the maps being the focus, I just slapped this thing together pretty quickly. I picked New York City because I have a bunch of photos from there, though I ended using a few CC licensed images from Flickr. The order I have things in kind of makes sense, but I think one could do a lot better. If I wanted to spend a lot more time creating a nice coherent list of sites to see, it would probably be much more rational and I'd actually pay attention to trying to fill the right amount of time in a day. (I tried to give myself leeway on that with a few passages about how this is only some suggested sites and readers should edit as they see fit.)
My prose is really not my prose. I mean I wrote it, but the style is sort of my sense of what generic markety-stuff would say. It's a poor attempt at mimicing a style that I don't know well and don't care for anyway. And generic markety-stuff doesn't really suit my mentality for taking a trip. If I want to see something, I'll go see it. If not, convince me by telling me about it's uniqueness or historical significance or its connections to some 19th century local architectural movement or something rather than offering glib snippets and random trivia.
Lastly, to be blunt, the site navigation is pretty crappy and I don't want to put time into making it non-crappy.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. I just want you to know, as I take up my beret and grow my artsy goatee out a bit more, that this page does not reflect the kind of web-art that is in keeping with my conception of what web-art ought to look like.
(With the exception of the background image for the pages, which I think looks pretty kick-ass.)
But since a couple people expressed interest, here it is! *grins* It does at least give you a sense of some of the sorts of things I like to see when I travel.
http://homepages.uwp.edu/allen019/geog350/Preparation.html
This is the first web site I've put together in, I'd say, at least ten years. The last time I made a web page I was writing HTML in notepad and FTPing it up to...was it Tripod? Anyway, these new programs that give you a WYSIWYG interface and let you drop in images and text and links and will auto-generate nav bars and stuff; that's slick!
One of these days I'm going to actually put together a real photography site for myself. Right now, though, I'm going to work on the references on my history paper for a little bit and go to bed.
It's supposed to be chillier tomorrow, but without the rain. I'd prefer the rain. I loved the warmth today so much, and I was more than happy to bike home in shorts with a rain poncho on!
I guess I'm a little embarrassed by it. I say that for several reasons. I can see myself writing a travel guide. But if I did, it wouldn't be like this.
First, it's not a very good travel guide. It doesn't need to be because the primary point of the project is to show that we can make halfway decent looking maps and put them in a web page.
The reason for that is that the professor thinks that hypertext and the internet are critical ways to communicate information in GIS systems. As much as GIS is about collecting and displaying data, it's also about communicating that data to other people in accessible, understandable ways. That makes sense, and I like that point of view.
But with the maps being the focus, I just slapped this thing together pretty quickly. I picked New York City because I have a bunch of photos from there, though I ended using a few CC licensed images from Flickr. The order I have things in kind of makes sense, but I think one could do a lot better. If I wanted to spend a lot more time creating a nice coherent list of sites to see, it would probably be much more rational and I'd actually pay attention to trying to fill the right amount of time in a day. (I tried to give myself leeway on that with a few passages about how this is only some suggested sites and readers should edit as they see fit.)
My prose is really not my prose. I mean I wrote it, but the style is sort of my sense of what generic markety-stuff would say. It's a poor attempt at mimicing a style that I don't know well and don't care for anyway. And generic markety-stuff doesn't really suit my mentality for taking a trip. If I want to see something, I'll go see it. If not, convince me by telling me about it's uniqueness or historical significance or its connections to some 19th century local architectural movement or something rather than offering glib snippets and random trivia.
Lastly, to be blunt, the site navigation is pretty crappy and I don't want to put time into making it non-crappy.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. I just want you to know, as I take up my beret and grow my artsy goatee out a bit more, that this page does not reflect the kind of web-art that is in keeping with my conception of what web-art ought to look like.
(With the exception of the background image for the pages, which I think looks pretty kick-ass.)
But since a couple people expressed interest, here it is! *grins* It does at least give you a sense of some of the sorts of things I like to see when I travel.
http://homepages.uwp.edu/allen019/geog350/Preparation.html
This is the first web site I've put together in, I'd say, at least ten years. The last time I made a web page I was writing HTML in notepad and FTPing it up to...was it Tripod? Anyway, these new programs that give you a WYSIWYG interface and let you drop in images and text and links and will auto-generate nav bars and stuff; that's slick!
One of these days I'm going to actually put together a real photography site for myself. Right now, though, I'm going to work on the references on my history paper for a little bit and go to bed.
It's supposed to be chillier tomorrow, but without the rain. I'd prefer the rain. I loved the warmth today so much, and I was more than happy to bike home in shorts with a rain poncho on!
