Web Authoring Blog

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫ Sgt. Pepper's one and only Lonely Hearts Club Band /  It's getting very near the end!  ♪♫

To this point, everyone delivered they own websites and our last assignment is only in our memories.  With the new semester shines up and showing us our new classmates and subjects, it's a good time to look back to your activities and do some self-assessment on things. As this is about Web Authoring, I'll talk about my website, in which there's a couple of things that I regret for, but in general, I'm kinda happy with the result.

(I had picked up that song before the end of the semester and couldn't finish this post back in that time, so, forgive me fellas!)

As you read here before, my site was about Paul McCartney. Here are some things that I would do totally different if I had the chance: 

1 - After finishing your wireframe, search and refer all the data that you'll use from other sources: that, I know, was a big issue for some of our classmates, since it's easy to take some images for instance from Google Images and by the end of the work, during the documentation process, have no idea at all in which website you found that pic or that text. I don't have that problem because of a simple lucky strategy: I used Zotero to save all my research and also get almost all of my images from the same source. The only thing that I would do differently it's that I would definitely create the documentation file alongside with the rest of the project, not in the very end. This is because you would probably forget some things after a while. 

2 - Finish your HTML file as soon as possible: that's a mistake that I think not everyone has, but I did: I finished the head and some part of the content of 2 or 3 pages and started to work on my CSS to "see how things would be like". After some do's and don'ts, I walked back to my HTML to finish the pages and that was a great way to get a lot of errors from the Validator. 

3 - Validate all the time. Seriously!: I don't even need to mention that the Validator is your best friend, and you can't forget him, not even for a second because... well, I did. And by the end of the work, I was full of little mistakes that I could avoid if I follow all the instructions. Frustrating. 

4 - Get your CSS done and work immediately in your Media Queries: this is really stupid, but why not full your CSS with all the nice things that you learned in your course and, only when the final due gets very close, started to work on your media queries? Is it sounds stupid enough? And what if I confess that I wasn't that good in media queries to give me the luxury of leaving them to the last hour? Well... some of them worked, some of them don't. And I'll review that all over again until I get it. 

5 - JavaScript is not for newbies:  I bet everybody knows that by this point of our journey, but OMG, that hamburger menu took off some of my nights and dreams. I can't imagine how hard another programming this will gonna be in this new semester, but I'm already terrified. 

6 - Try to get time to write posts up on the date on this blog: does everybody noticed that I started to write this like almost three weeks ago? For now on, let's try and make this content really be up to date (but I can't promise anything, okay?) 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫ Broadcast the boom boom boom boom / And make 'em all dance to it ♪♫

My first post of 2018 it will be about my podcast - and I’m late on sharing this, right? - but, well, let’s do it now.

I used this opportunity to talk about the way in which people discover music through the web and the relationship between musicians and independent music websites. To help me out, I interviewed my friend and editor of the music website Tenho Mais Discos Que Amigos (I Have More Records Than Friends) Tony Aiex.

As our best record from 2017 was Melodrama, by Lorde (if you want to check the list, click here) I can't avoid it. This post needs to have Lorde on it! 

I hope you enjoy it!

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

🎶 Mas não existe megabyte / Pra uma vontade / e a gente nunca quer nada fácil... 🎶

That's the first time that I use a Portuguese lyric as a title for this blog and it's also the very first time in when I'll not talk about Web Authoring itself, but about our Masters, in general.

Yesterday, after we finished our documentaries presentations on the lab, I remembered this song: it’s “Marginal Tietê”, from Skank, my favourite Brazilian band (yeah, if you’re not Brazilian, this name also have another meaning, but they doesn't have that intention, I swear). On direct translation, this specific part of the lyric means that “It doesn’t exist any measure (megabytes) to a desire (or something that you really want) / and we never want nothing easy”.

For me, this represents a fact: if something comes in a really easy way, it loses the importance, it doesn't have the same meaning, it's not that good. When we suffer, when we have to fight for it, put a lot of effort and work hard, then it worth it.

Finishing our assignments during this semester, delivering some of them and still working in others, and my overall experience with this masters until now, it's the most difficult and challenging thing that I did in my entire life. Every day I woke up with a different thing to do, to learn, to think, to write, a new tutorial to watch, a new schedule to do something, or a book to read, a influencer to follow, a blog post to read... all of this together with the experience of living in another country, speaking another language all the time and find a new house, a job, some friends, a new life. It's being hard, but, as I said before, I would be disappointed if it was easy.

I'm here, ready to get more.

But for now, let us just have some days to rest...

(And developing our websites!)

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫  But I had to get it worked out / had nobody who could help / so then in the end it turned out / That I had to do it by myself! ♪♫

As my friend Lihn told me yesterday, "You always find a music for anything". What about the title of this post? It's a song from Paul McCartney called "Queenie Eye" and it fits exactly with the proposal of this post: talk about my website and my hero. Another good thing is: Paul McCartney is my hero, so, perfect match again! 

So, without Ruairi around to tell us the exact measures of paddings, margins and borders, give us some advice on how to organize our HTML archive, tricks on JavaScript or anything like that, here we are, all by ourselves, building our first website.

The first thing to do is find your personal hero, someone that worth it receive a website made by yourself. That answer comes to my mind very quickly: Sir Paul was performing in my country during October and receive the payment for the tickets that I sold to move to Ireland, during the week that Ruairi introduces us the briefing, so, coincidence or not, here we are.

And why this old fella is my hero, do you ask. Well, there's a lot of answers for it. Firsts things first, he is a Beatle, a legend alive, one of the most talented and creative musicians of all times. That does not need to be proved, but it is still here, creating and working until today. The song on this post title is from 2013 and it is not his last song released. He's 75. His concerts last about three hours, time while he does not even stop to drink water.

He is vegetarian for more than 40 years now. Thus he also supports a lot of institutions that defend the animal rights and is one of the creators of Meat Free Monday, an initiative to promote one day a week without eating meat, to people to try and see that it isn't that complicated or hard. He also promotes music in a way to treat and cure people and also to give a new path to children and teenagers living at risk to be involved with drugs and violence.

If those reasons aren't enough to love, admire and wants to pay homage to someone, well, he's Paul McCartney and deserves one more website. And I'll create it! 

Keep following my playlist, guys, I promise I will not disappoint you! 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫ Oh please, I bet everybody here is fake happy too... ♪♫

This is the last Paramore song released:  

Okay Rakky, what this has to do with our daily life and assignments?

As we study in Digital Media and Society, we are living a trivial time in our history as human beings: more and more we are connected with others through our cell phones, our favourite social media, our friends from far away and our ways to feel connected. We connect, we share, we exist. But what is real and what is not? 

Do you ever have a conversation interrupted because your friend needs to answer another on his or her cell phone? Or experimented the sensation of trying to look at your mobile just to not get bored on a class that you're lost or on a meeting that you're not so engaged? More important than that: do you have a feeling that, sometimes, the life of others through their social media is always brighter and happier than yours? Food on Instagram looks taster than on our plates, travelling is something perfect from those posts and nothing wrong ever happen. Why do we need so much to share and to follow? 

The answers could be in anywhere.  At the same time that we need to show ourselves, obeying our exhibitionism sense, we also need to follow, our voyeurism self is activated there. 

This video clip inspires me to think all of that because, as the lyrics also said, everyone has a fake happy face to show. But where's the truth of ourselves? 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫ Eyes are gonna roll back / I'm here to kill time...♪♫

Ahá! That post that I mentioned days ago on my Twitter account it just arrived! 

Okay, I think this is also a good topic for another post in my Web Authoring blog, right? — Rakky Curvelo (@rakky_curvelo) November 30, 2017

I need to confess that my research for this assignment wasn't that hard. I already have some of my main questions done to my Digital Media and Society assignment and I also use one of my same interviewees to help me out, so, I just work on a while on my script: the way that people discover music nowadays through the web.

To recorder, as a Mac user, I find the Skype Call Recorder useful, but if you're a Windows user, maybe you should use something like Mp3 Skype Recorder. 

And then, the editing part. Audacity has a lot of functionalities that make our lives easier when we found out that they are around. Some of them are well explained in this tutorial that I found on YouTube. 

Now, I need to finish putting everything together and we will see. 

So, wish me luck and I hope I have help someone in here... 

(And remember, my playlist it's going crazy now!)

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♫♪ From all the drinks I get drunk off music...from all the bitches! The one I wanna be is music ♫♪

Until this point of my journey as an Applied Digital Media student, I think there's no one class colleague that doesn't realise yet that I love music. And this passion moves me to search for some answers in my essay to Digital Media & Society Assignment. But, please, read this article listening to this song that, sometimes, is so silly but so cool that's almost a part of my biography:

(Yeah, this band calls CSS and isn't from Cascading Style Sheets, but from Cansei de Ser Sexy, or in direct translation "Tired to be Sexy!" :D)

My intention was to create a panorama of how the way people listen to music has changed in the last 50/60 years and expose a problem that is often not even considered by most people: as users of streaming services, the most popular way of listening to music nowadays, we forget to think about how artists are paid for the music we are listening to.

In the past, independent musicians were able to achieve some success by partnering with major record labels and releasing their records for them, reaching out to the general public, selling CDs, shows, and making profits from it. With the democratization of the internet, simply make your music available on some streaming platform and spread it on social networks, to reach a large audience. But this came with a very high price: music was no longer seen as a valuable asset and came to be seen as a service. The most common way to get the money for their work is creating deals with streaming music platforms and exposing your music there, to guarantee that the public will have access to it. 

In one article for Time, Gary Moskowitz explains that those individual deals change according to the agreements that the artists and digital distributors do, but this number is not as good as a general audience can expect. For instance, Pandora or Sirius paid approximately $ 0.0023 per music play, while Spotify amount is between $ 0,006 and $ 0.0084 and iTunes Radio $ 0.0014. The most lucrative deal for the artists seems to be BandCamp, that offers to all the artists the same deal: it’s possible to sell on the site and get paid directly by fans, with BandCamp taking 15% on digital and 10% on sales of LPs, t-shirts and tickets.

My research aimed to expose this reality to anyone who may not know the data and draw attention to it, in order to - perhaps - encourage reflection: if my work, in any area of work, deserves to be paid, because the work of a musician, an art form that impacts and transforms, would not deserve the same treatment?

It is well known that many ordinary music consumers do not give a damn about how much the artist will receive, as long as he can get the music he wants for a cheap price. But what if we think about it in the long run, how does it feel? Will we in the future have creative people doing the kind of music we love, even though they know that creativity will not be appreciated? What technology will disrupt this barrier?

Much has been said about solutions in Blockchain to ensure that the independent artist can have a more direct relationship with their audience and receive earnings for their work, but there is still nothing definitive. For now, the only way to ensure that the artist you like receives some return for your affection is by buying their records, their merchandising, going to their shows.

As crazy as music you know I am, I care. What about you? 

Yeah, before I forget, if you were in the class that day, you know that I made a presentation with a lot of music as the title of my slides and created a Spotify Playlist with them. For now on, I'll also keep that playlist updated with this pieces of music that I put as the title of this blog contents and some of my favourite bands that I highly recommend that everyone listen to. If you have any interest in them, please, follow it on Spotify! 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♫♪ I, I follow! I follow RULES! CSS baby... I follow RULES! ♫♪

That was a really bad joke that I made on a bus while talking with my colleague Flávio (his blog is GREAT, follow him!), but even though this is really bad, I want to use it as a title, cause it's a music reference (and you, my only one reader, already know how this works) and because this post will only be about CCS rules and, OH MY GOD, how they are terrifying and amazing at the same time...

It's being a while since our first CSS class (when that bus conversation took place, by the way) but since that first week, I realized that this is it: CSS follow specific rules to apply in your HTML in a colourful meaning and organized way.

Each selector has to be told exactly what to do with each property and each value and is essential to be very specific to get the result that you're expecting on your page.

Of course, the theoretical thing is very romantic, is beautiful see how well things work when you're describing them instead of, in fact, coding. A thousand of mistakes and misunderstandings after, I found out a useful tutorial, that I'd like to share with all: https://www.w3schools.com/css/

Next time I'll try to make an entire parody, instead of only using the chorus part, but, till them...

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♫♪ In my place, in my place... were lines that i couldn't change...i was lost, oh yeah ♪♫

This will be like e a person blog post, but I can't say it enough: A BACKUP IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR LIFE!

After spent part of the assignments week worried about having lost all my documentary rushes (a subject that has nothing to do with Web Authoring, but I told you that this is gonna be kind of personal, so, let'’ go!), because my computer decided that this week it be perfect for him to stop to working properly, I spent the other part reading HTML / CCS Tutorials, Digital Media and Society papers, working on the final part of my Research Methods assignment and recovering my rushes from my dear catastrophe documentary.

Putting all this on past, I actually spent the end of a Thursday, part of a Friday and part of a Saturday working on my rushes log. And if you think I had a copy of that archive cause I had learned the lesson on the beginning of the week, you're wrong! I started my Sunday backing-up some old pictures from my Gallery (more then 3 years of drunk faces, amazing concerts and incredible trips) and then, it happen again: the computer stoped to answer. This time, I didn't cry, I didn't felt lost, I didn't ask for Apple's miraculous help: I just sit down on my chair, found my external hard drive and started a new Mac OX Sierra installation inside of it, because I knew that if I could access the computer using another boot disk, I would recover everything, including my 18 pages of rushes log that, of course, I haven't copied to anywhere else.

Now I'm here, finishing my 4º different backup from the week, hoping that I never forget that lesson again and sharing this with you because I don't want anyone with the same kind of issue. So, after finishing work in any archive, from now on and forever PLEASE MAKE A COPY OF IT AND KEEP IT IN ANY OTHER PLACE. 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♫♪ Think I've had enough / of generation, information, every station / And I can't turn it off...♪♫

Here's an article for you, guys: Nanobots will live in our brains in the 2030s, says Google Boss.

Scary, han?  Most of all, when we think that the same person that's saying it is a man that already talked about things that looked insane in the past but are happening in front of our eyes nowadays.  It's clear that we are walking in a path that doesn't have backsteps: the era of Artificial Intelligence. Chances are that we spent the next years watching all those changes in computing and science while other people do the hard job, or that we engage this scenario to be part of those changes. In which side of the table you want to be? 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪♫ For what it's worth, I know it's just a word and words betray...♪♫

Last week we finished our studies in HTML language and started to look through CSS, that coding secret that puts colour, order and style in our web pages. During my exercise coding, I realized that sometimes, if you don't put the right word in the right order and in the right place, your entire code will be wrong (and our friend Validator will look at you as you were a fool!).  

As my colleague Courtney explains before me, there's a way to escape those HTML fails: you need to close all your tags, tab all your code and validate while you're coding. It's impossible to be more clear than that. 

My next post will probably be about some CSS rules, but let's finish it for now. 

Before I go, I have no idea about why I did it, but here we go, I'll share something weird with you. I put the word "HTML" on Spotify search tool and I found out that there's a Spotify Playlist called <DOCTYPE html> and I think everyone gets the right of knowing it (click on the link and have fun!) 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪ there is no one in here / but yooour body deeeear! ♫

By the end of the second week of Web Authoring, we are creating our own website! I know it sounds "nerdish", but I'm really liking. As I mentioned before, that wasn't my first experience with HTML language, so it's being fun and, in the same time, a little bit nostalgic. I think the teenager Rakky would be proud of me.

(And I shouldn't have said that!)

Code time: we learn how to create lists (unordered or <ul> and ordered or <ol>), using the <li> to put all the items inside it, how to manage our links inside a page (using <a href> and </a>, and also how to put images in our sites, using the element <img src>. Of course, everything inside the <body>! 

In a while, we'll be posting our own creations and then...I really love English but Brazilian Portuguese has some unique expressions like AI A PORRA VAI FICAR SÉRIA! and I think this is beautiful! 

Ah: before I finished, I need to make it be more interessing for not HTML fans, so I decided to put some music on. I spent all my week with the song I mentioned in this article title in my mind. Do you guys know which band I'm talking about? 

[rakkywebauthoringblog]

♪ will we start over again... ♫

<!-- Hello World! --> 

This is my first post in this blog, which is a sentence that I thought I have never ever will be used again since I started so many blogs in my life that I thought it was enough. Anyway, here we go again: I’m Raquelline (not my fault, my mother give me that name, but if you please call me Rakky it will be better for everyone), I’m 29 years old, I’m a journalist. 

All of that said before, I’m excited about creating new content to Web Authoring classes. I used to know a little bit about HTML language back in my teenage days when I used some of this structure to create a fan-club page for my favourite rock band. Of course, that doesn't exist anymore, but it was fun using attributes as <colour> and <font size=10>. I know those are old memorabilia, but it's good to see that not everything is lost. 

That’s all folks! Welcome to my Web Authoring blog!