Monday, July 6th, 2009
An ability to resolve work according to the objectives defined in your proposal
My initial proposal aims and objectives were as follows. I will speak about each one in turn:
Aims:
To make a (very lateral) history of language and meaning using the word ‘all’ as my focus.
The focus has shifted here from history to documentary snapshot. The project is about people’s perception of the word’s history and present as opposed to the history itself. I am using the internet to help me get the viewer to be part of producing that snapshot.
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Category ma, summary | Tags: Tags: unit 3 report,
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
Making the plinth for my questionnaire has been interesting. I had initially wanted to make something quite complicated. I wanted it to be an object in itself. This is easier said than done though. Ideally it would have been galvanised steel and quite carefully designed.
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Category final show, final show things, the finished thing | Tags: Tags: final show, plinth, presentation,
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Okay, so I’m reminded of why I hate (hate hate hate) using other people’s scripts. The AJAX poller has stopped working. I’ve spent about two hours trying to figure out why, deleting and re-uploading different files, all sorts. It’s still not working. It’s been fine for ages. I’ve done nothing to it to the best of my knowledge. The vote goes on to the database. I checked. I checked the error log. No error. Does it give me the result graph back? Obviously not.
Very very very annoyed.
And what’s more, I have no idea what to do beyond deleting the whole thing and redoing it from scratch. I would naturally rather avoid this eventuality.
Very very very annoyed. Would blog about other things but want to fix other things having wasted so much time on that.
NB – Prospective employers please note that this problem was fixed the following day. You live and learn.
Category technical frustrations, the finished thing | Tags: Tags: aaaarggghhh!!!, questionnaire,
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Hurrah. It’s now gone ten on Sunday and I’ve just spent most of the weekend getting nothing done because I’ve been looking for a decent captcha tutorial. They’re all either rubbish or built for wordpress. Very annoying. I’m beginning to wonder what the best course of action is.
On a brighter note, I found a word cloud that seems to work quite well. It’s called dynacloud.js and it’s pretty simple. So that’s there as and when I need it. Good.
Category technical frustrations, the finished thing | Tags: Tags: aaaarggghhh!!!, captcha,
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
I’ve been investigating how to make buttons that will give me a different kind of interactivity. Kenji’s shown me a few things. I’m undecided about the idea though. The whole point of the questionnaire (to my mind) has always been that in filling it out people will have a chance to think about the questions. That won’t happen if it’s just a case of hitting buttons. The process of thinking through an answer and typing it out is integral to the project.
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Category the finished thing | Tags: Tags: buttons, interaction,
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
I’ve been trying to implement two things for my questionnaire. One is a tag cloud which comes back after the user has filled in their answer. This will give them two entry points in to all of these words.
Now I come to write this I’m considering the value of having the tag cloud at all. Is it any more than a trick? Will it help people to reflect on the questionnaire. I’m actually inclined to think that the best things here will be the simplest. People will want to read other people’s answers. They’ll definitely want to do that. Who wouldn’t?
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Category making humjam | Tags: Tags: flickr stream, julian jans, PHP, questionnaire, word cloud,
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
One issue with my questionnaire is spam. Any online text form is open to a lot of spam. I need a way of protecting myself against it. The most common way is the CAPTCHA (stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). I hate these things. I think most people do. You know the things where you have to type in a mash of letters and half the time they’re impossible to see and if they’re not, at best they ruin the pleasant flow of the navigation. I really don’t want that. They’re fine for Yahoo! but not for this. I don’t want one of those CAPTCHAs coming near my questionnaire. There’s also a useful page on the accessibility issues associated with CAPTCHAs on the W3C website.
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Category making humjam | Tags: Tags: captcha, hum, humjam, questionnaire, spam,
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
NB – Please note that I wrote most of this post about a week ago but didn’t feel like it was finished for some reason. By rights the date on this ought to be 18th of June.
I’ve found an ajax polling system that takes one closed question, adds it to a database and serves back the results for the poll immediately. Exactly what I need. I had some trouble getting it to work but the basic problems I didn’t figure out myself were solved on this useful ubuntu forum discussion.
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Category experiments, making humjam | Tags: Tags: ajax poll, data, data visualisation, questionnaire,
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
Ellie Rees’ visit was interesting earlier today. One thing she said that I found useful was that she makes very little of her living through selling her work. Most of it comes from teaching, residencies and so on. I think I’m going to make all of my online work available on creative commons from now on, meaning it won’t really be that sellable, even if there was a significant market for online work.
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Category General rambling | Tags: Tags: post ma, professional practice,
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
This reminds me of one of the mesmerising films Andy showed earlier. I’m more taken by it for other more pressing reasons. I can definitely relate to the way this guy feels. I got the link for it at fontfeed.com. Here’s the creator’s own comment: “Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline”.
PS – many thanks to Brian for pointing out that the final show website has issues in Internet Explorer 7. I’ve just spent a while fixing most of them but now my housemate’s computer seems to have got stuck on it at one state and it’s still not showing the menu. I can’t disable the cache on it either. Aargh! I will fix it in the morning. Honestly, I marvel at the attitude of a company who respond the poor quality of their product by giving its key users the tools to fix their product’s inadequacies by giving them a conditional statement for css. The frustrating thing is that I checked it a few times in IE, but now I come to think of it the later occasions were in IE8. Crap.
Category miscellaneous and fun | Tags: Tags: internet exploder, post it notes,