Megan Vitale @megvitale - Tumblr Blog

Lazy afternoon #sittinginbed #nannanap #weddingrecovery #firenze #duomo

#nannanap #weddingrecovery #firenze #sittinginbed #duomo

What a spectacular winter morning in Melbourne #thetan #8.5kmstoday #fatbeagleneedstolose5kgs #fatladyneedstolose15kgs #ilovemelbourne

#fatbeagleneedstolose5kgs #8 #fatladyneedstolose15kgs #thetan #ilovemelbourne

Good morning Melbourne! #babyitscoldoutside

#babyitscoldoutside

Assessment 3: Geo-Narrative

Assessment 3: Production Project

Geo-Narrative Rationale

For assessment 3 for the Networked Media Production Unit, I decided on the geo-narrative option as it complimented and expanded upon the body of work that I was already undertaking as part of my blog in assessment 2.

My blog was dedicated to my walking travels around Richmond with my two dogs, so I thought it would be perfect to be able to show some of these posts on a map for visitors to find for themselves.

Richmond, once a working class suburb is now quite a culturally diverse and interesting suburb, so I found there were a number of ways I could approach this project from a geo-narrative perspective. I considered a range of other options such as ‘Fit in Richmond’ highlighting all of the fun physical activities to do, or ‘Out and About in Richmond’ showcasing all of the popular café’s, pubs and restaurants. I even mocked them up on a map to test them out.

I also did quite a bit of searching through Tumblr to see if any other bloggers were documenting the area and to see what they were doing. I discovered that I was the only person exploring this subject, so in the end I wanted to show visitors a side to Richmond that they wouldn’t already know and share some of its hidden treasures.

As I had quite a lot of images collected, the list of possibilities to include on this map was quite long. As the brief limited the entries to 10-12 images, I decided to choose my 4 favourite images from each of the following headings:

1. Typography

Royston Hotel

Baby Pizza

Rowena Heights

Space

2. Street Art

Richmond Tiger

Botherambo Street

Number 8

Type

3. Richmond Icons

Dimmeys Clock

Nylex Clock

Skipping Girl Vinegar

St Ignatius Church

Once I’d made this decision, my next step was to mark out all of the features on a map with a pen and paper to see how it all flows. I then transferred these markers onto Google Maps using the ‘My Places’ feature.

I then spent quite a bit of time learning and discovering how to create custom markers for my map as I wanted the photograph of each location to be the visual marker. I created all of my markers in Photoshop, and that was where the fun began…

Technical difficulties

At first I encountered some rather difficult issues uploading my custom icons to the map. After much research and testing, I finally was able to resolve the issue using a combination of Google products: Google Picasa, Google Chrome and Google Maps. Picasa was used to host the custom markers online after creation and Chrome was used as the browser that would enable the upload.

Previously I had tried hosting the markers on a number of sites including my personal website, facebook, dropbox, flickr and eventually (and successfully) using Picasa. The in-text images weren’t a problem and were hosted on my personal web site.

If this failed, I had also research a back-up option that Google provides - a range of pre-designed markers. In the end I did not need to go down this path (http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-icons/wiki/CultureIcons )

Being able to select a topic that complimented my blog (assessment 2), I found that I was able to embrace a range of technologies to share my information ie. Google Maps, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

The full version of the map is available online at: https://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?msid=215440534782052593721.0004dcf64f47d5dca9a68&msa=0&ll=-37.821819,145.007558&spn=0.029052,0.066047

#metapost #rationale #geonarrative #ucgd #hg164 #networkedmediaproduction #assessment3

Richmond Ramblers: Metapost

The last hoo-raaar!

7881 Networked Media Production

Assessment 2 - Blog

For Assessment 2 in Networked Media Production we were each asked to create a blog of our own on a topic of our choice. I struggled with a topic for my blog for a little while as I'd never written for a blog before. In the end I chose to highlight the hidden treasures I find around Richmond each day while walking my dogs. There are so many things I find in my travels and thought this would be the perfect outlet to show them.

I tried wherever possible to relate the blog content back to the lectures however I did find that this was not easily done without detracting from the blog.

Customisations

"Royal Ribbon" template by wakecodesleep was applied

Google Analytics was applied

A number of ornamental items were removed from the page using CSS and HTML

A disqus comment module was added to enable visitors to make comments on blog posts

Tumblr was configured to automatically publish the posts to Facebook and to Twitter, with the Twitter feed publishing to the top of the page also.

An 'About Us' page was created

A 'Licensing' page was created to inform visitors of their rights to use any images published on this blog.

Footer information was ammended to include the current Copyright date and credit my customisations.

MetaTags were used on each post to enable visitors to find my posts easily.

Licensing When considering licensing of this blog, I chose to use the Creative Commons License 'Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported' which allows anybody to use the images for their own purpose at no charge. The only condition being that they must give me credit for the image. The Licensing arrangement is outlined on a custom linked page in the top menu bar, called 'Licensing'. Publicity In class I created a number of prototypes for generating publicity for the site, these included:

Window Sticker

Coffee Sleeve

Digital/Web banner (as seen on the Richmond Ramblers facebook page)

Each post includes metatags to identify the picture and the blog, so if anybody were to search Tumblr for these terms, my blog would be prominently featured. Not many people within my network of friends have a tumblr account, but I was able to enlist those with Tumblr accounts to join and spread the word to follow my blog. Social Media I was able to link my Tumblr blog to a custom Facebook page and Twitter account so whenever I published a blog entry it would automatically post through to these sites.

Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Richmondramblers3121

Twitter page https://twitter.com/RichmondRambler

A Twitter widget is also used to publish Twitter comments from Richmond Ramblers to the top of the blog page. I also approached the organisers of 'The Island State', a facebook page with over 2000 followers, dedicated to the suburb of Richmond. They have posted a number of my pictures on their page, see if you recognise any: https://www.facebook.com/islandstate/photos_stream

Visitation & Blog activity

At the time of posting this blog entry, Richmond Ramblers could report the following statistics:

17 Followers

21 Blog posts

28 'hearts' on posts

The three most popular blog posts were:

Number 8 http://richmond3121.tumblr.com/image/48591967385 Visitors: 8

Rainbow Pole http://richmond3121.tumblr.com/image/49920246922 Visitors: 8

The View From Here http://richmond3121.tumblr.com/image/44100502532 Visitors: 3

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I hope you enjoyed your virtual visit to Richmond, Victoria as much as I enjoyed documenting it.

Megan

#metapost #ucgd #hg164 #RichmondRamblers

A little sneak preview of my geo-narrative assessment that is due on Monday. I've put together a series of my favourite things in Richmond. The list could be seriously long and it was very difficult narrowing it down to just 12. I decided to choose 4 from each of the following headings:

Typography

Street Art

Richmond Icons

Hope you enjoy!

#hg164 #ucgd #richmondramblers #richmond #richmond3121 #geonarrative