Guide to UiB 2

For the second Guide to UiB assignment I worked in a group with Helene and Margrete and we made a portal for the UiB guide called En rundtur på Høyden.

We decided to provide a narrative that takes the reader on a trip around campus while linking to pages about the places it mentions. We also included UiB’s own map of the campus which links to a larger version with a legend.

In addition to the narrative we have organised the different pages in a menu list to the right of the portal. As there are many similiar guide pages describing the same place we decided to only add one link for each place. This way we feel the user isn’t given redundant information, and the menu is easier to navigate in as it’s relatively short. Alternatively, we could have included some sort of additional links to other similar pages besides each list item, but we didn’t come up with any solutions we thought would’ve worked.

We categorised the different places by faculty where applicable, the student centre and miscellaneous.

Designwise we tried to keep it simple, yet attractive, with a neutral background pattern and simple boxes. To make the menu list stick out we gave it another background colour and added an arrow to the links in the list items.

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Bashed mashup

Directly related to last week’s HUIN105 lecture: My friend Stian got one of his hit mashup videos blocked on YouTube, and blogged about it:

Personally I think this is the big cultural battle of our generation; the Rock’n’Roll of the 21st century. As Lawrence Lessig puts it, we are no longer consuming culture the way we did only ten years ago. We are using the cultural products we consume to express ourselves in new ways, and the creation of new material based upon old is a key part. We want to be able to remix culture, not to make money off of it, but to express who we are, what we believe and how we perceive these cultural expressions.

Arkivert i:Culture , copyright, mashup, remix, youtube

Browse the web aesthetically

It’s obviously inevitable for many web sites, but I can’t imagine how painful it must be for a web designer to see a dear project blemished by advertisements. I assume the pain is prominent for users as well, it is for me at least. Ads occupy valuable real estate in my browser window, they’re extra bytes I have to download and rarely is an ad something that pleases my eyes. In short, they’re (f)ugly.

So, now that I have this blog as a part of the HUIN105 course anyway, it seems fitting to write a little tutorial for something I’m pretty passionate about: Blocking ads on websites.

Blocking ads with Firefox and Adblock Plus

Ads are virtually everywhere on the web and they can appear in any type of format. One popular way to serve ads is through Flash animations. In addition to being extra annoying, these ads often hog a significant amount of your computer’s resources.

So, Flash animations and other ad types are annoying and we need a way for the browser to filter this content out. The most complete and usable ad-blocking solution is the combination of the Adblock Plus and the Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper addons for the Firefox browser.

Adblock Plus let’s you subscribe to maintained lists of known ad sources and does a very good job of blocking out of the box.

Above is a screenshot of Aftenposten.no with and without Adblock Plus enabled. As you can see, all but one ad were successfully blocked. Additionally, the filesize of the complete web page went down from 1.7 MB to 1.2 MB. That’s 30% less bandwidth I have to use, and (I assume) 30% faster rendering of the page.

However, along with the ad that didn’t get blocked, there’s still some unwanted white-space left from the blocked ads we want to get rid of. This is where the Element Hider Helper comes in. This addon lets us select elements in the page we don’t want displayed and then tells Adblock Plus to block that as well.

This is what the page looks like after I’ve removed unblocked ads and the white-space left in from the blocked ads.

It gets even better. For each element you select with the Element Hider Helper it asks you if you want the element to be blocked on the specific page only, or on any domain. So when you see that an element with an id like “advertisements” or “ads-top” you can easily tell Adblock to filter such elements out for every page you visit in the future.

Blocking even more unwanted content

OK, so we’ve gotten rid of all the ads. There’s still plenty of content on web sites I never use and have no interest of seeing. A good example is the article page on Dagbladet.no. In the picture below you’ll see that I have reduced an article page down to the bare minimum.

All that’s left is the actual article and it’s photographs. With all that secondary content I don’t need removed, I think the page is much more aesthetically pleasing. And I’m willing to bet a fair amount of my student loan that the web designer at Dagbladet would agree with me.

If you’re not interested in Firefox (why wouldn’t you be?) other browsers have similar, though inferior, features. Opera has built-in content blocking and there’s an ad blocking plugin for Safari.

Arkivert i:Technology , adblocking, adblockplus, aesthetics, firefox, tutorial, www

The Pirate Bay

Why did the company or organisation make this website?

The Pirate Bay was made to serve as an open bittorrent tracker where anyone can download and upload torrent files with virtually any types of content.

Who do you think they imagine will view it? Who is the target audience (målgruppen)?

The target audience of The Pirate Bay is every internet user that wants to download and share files, namely pirates.

How have they tried to reach or attract this target audience? Think about the use of language (a particular style?), the images and visual design, the tone of voice.

The Pirate Bay is now the worlds largest bittorrent tracker and as such they don’t really need to rely on anything else than word of mouth to gain new users. The design of the site is very simple and lets users easily search for torrents. Also, they don’t care very much about legal threats and they post all legal mails and their responses to the website, which amuses some people.

Do you think it works well? Why/why not?

As the worlds largest bittorrent it works very well. Users can find mostly whatever they want and the torrents usually have a decent amount of peers.

Arkivert i:Assignments , assignment, filesharing, huin105, piratebay

Photo from photo hike

Yesterday we went on a photo hike to take pictures for our Guide to UiB assignment.

This is a picture of the cantina at Studentsenteret

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Why I chose to take HUIN105

Web design and coding has been one of my main hobbies since middle school, and as a self-taught amateur web designer I’m really interested in learning more from an academic point of view. Also, as I’m a believer in accessibility and usability, it will be really interesting to see how deep this course goes on about those subjects. It was with a bit of grief when I discovered one of our textbooks suggests using tables for other than tabular data, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what they tell us in the lectures before I start flaming anyone…

Another reason why I chose HUIN105 is the aesthetic aspect of the course. I really look forward to learning about this in a university course rather than on my own, surfing the web. I think what I learn in this course will be a brilliant addition to what I already know, as I most definitely will learn about ideas and practices that are new to me.

Arkivert i:Assignments , assignment, huin105

Previous experience with blogging

Have
 you
 blogged
 before?
 Do
 you
 read 
blogs? 
Link 
to 
some 
blogs 
or 
other 
websites 
you enjoy. Do you like the idea of blogging?


The above is one of three blog posts I have to write as part of an assignment in HUIN105.

I have indeed blogged before. When I was in middle school I started playing around with HTML and CSS, and pretty basic home pages. It didn’t take long until I discovered Blogger and started maintaining a couple of blogs on there. As far as I can recall, there was a blog for our Counter-Strike clan and a personal blog.
Later, as WordPress was forked from b2, I started using WP when my blogging needs would arise.
Nowadays I don’t have a personal blog, but I do maintain a couple of WP sites for some student organisations.

On a daily basis I get my internet fix from BoingBoing, The Register and Digg, among others. Some of the blogs I subscribe to include kottke, Ironic Sans, NRKBeta and Binary Bonsai.

I like the idea of blogging because it lets interesting people publish interesting things while staying up to date. In addition, it’s really useful when companies use blogs to update their customers on upcoming products and other useful information.

Personally, I’m more into the coding and designing of a blog or website, rather than the actual writing aspect of it, simply because I don’t think I’m all that interesting. This is however subject to change as the HUIN105 course goes forward…

Arkivert i:Assignments , assignment, blogging, huin105, personal