Final Project Write-Up

Here’s What I Planned to Do

“I am going to make a Runescape adventure log so as to share my gaming escapades with those who may need a few pointers and for those who love the game. I’ll do this on a blog because then I’ll be able to add things like .gif files, podcasts, and videos to give diversity to my posts.” -Project Proposal

Here’s What I Did and What Happened

I created Potam like I said I would. She is a member’s character on Runescape. To introduce her, I went through the creation process and took screenshots like I said I would in my proposal. I had originally planned to only play for an hour everyday but I found that one our of play was not nearly enough to do something super exciting to write about. Each play-session ended up extending to two or three hours, four maximum, when I did the two-part posts for quests and when I would play with my friends.

It took me awhile to figure out when would be the opportune time to post and I missed some deadlines for the first two weeks but after that I posted everyday minus one week where I only could post three times.

When it came to Potam as a character, I spoke through her point of view for every post and as Potam evolved as a character I found it easier and easier to create her story. I met some very interesting people. Whenever I ran into a snag in the road, like my first desert quest that I still haven’t finished because it was just too frustrating. Some posts I could add the gallery at the end which included my inventory when I finished the session, where I was, and what my skill levels were looking like. However, I did not do this on all the posts due to the fact that some sessions I had to split into multiple posts (this happened many times when I went questing or I was talking to people in Lumbridge the whole time and nothing changed). I also had said in my proposal I was going  to add in bold at the end of my posts the amount of money Potam had but I found it looked kind of tacky since I was screenshotting everything else.

My organizational process was probably the thing I stuck to most as well as the depth of my posts. I am a detail oriented person so recording every tiny thing was essential. I directly stated in my proposal that “my categories will be based on skills, quests, and any other specialties I find like the Grand Exchange or the wilderness.” I did exactly this. Jake Ford noticed this in his Studio Tour: “One thing I admire about the project is that the posts here are very consistent and in-depth. The use of links is great, as well. After also looking at one of the blogs she said she was modeling her’s after in her proposal (Jax’s), I’d say I could learn more for Devan’s.”

There are two things I did not do that I had fully planned to do: make a podcast and make  a video. I had enough recorded game footage to make a full-length feature film but when I went to edit, crop, export, and post I found my software wasn’t sufficient enough to convert my file into the proper file to post online. The same goes for a podcast. To post .mp3 files on WordPress I had to go premium member which was not going to happen since I was already paying for a membership elsewhere.

The purpose of the podcast was to get other people involved. The video was to act as an example. Fortunately, I did get some outsider input through my posts where I played with a couple of my other friends. Not only did they make me expand beyond just that (when I ventured over to the old school RS instead of just talking about it), I had some pretty fun times as well. I made sure to link to their Twitters/Wordpress blogs so as to give them some recognition.

Comments on my posts came from veteran users  but I still had quite a few viewers regardless of the pink candy floss. Many of my views came from search engines meaning my tags were doing their job. I could have gone out and advertised more but I felt like that might be considered spamming, something I am not too keen to take part in.

Using WordPress for this project was a good idea at first but comparing that with my knowledge of Tumblr, I feel Tumblr would have been a better base just because of the capabilities available. However, WordPress was great to use when it came to my organization. Finding and linking things (this also includes the .gif files) in my posts was extremely easy.

When it comes down to it, I followed my proposal with few mis-steps such as the podcast and the odd posting days but overall I stuck with my contract where every post was at least 500-words long, most of the time at least 700. I learned a TON about WordPress, thouh. I’m a person who learns by doing and exploring a bit, although we had the manual, I learned the most about WordPress by using it and creating my own project through it. I also went into this with a very strict writing style but as time went on I became more relaxed and just typed like I would type, since Potam was me this was form her point of view in her voice because that was the voice the other RSplayers heard as well.

Studio tours: Where I judge people for a grade.

First we’ll begin with Dennis Staples and his wiki work:

Working a wiki is a tough job and as we can see in your first review, you were practically the only guy doing it! I had never heard of anything minutely like the Abarat series so reading your first article was definitely…eye opening…Well written, though! I feel like I might need to check this series out. There are times where you admit not knowing something or you don’t remember something and you deliberately do not write about it. I really respect that because there are far too many wikis out there that simply fudge the details if they don’t know just to fill space. 

Excellent work on the series summary! I can tell you have a strong passion for these works and it clearly shows in how you write about them. There are so many names to keep track of, as if the seven John brothers weren’t hard enough. You added just as much and as little as you could and still made the summary enjoyable. Coming from someone who checks up on her favorite series’ wikis often, I really appreciate this! Keep up the good work.

 

Next on the docket would be Sir Matthew Lavrenz and his adventures through his MInecraft world:

Seriously this kid has done some work. In the beginning he had nothing but walked us through every step of the process to survival. To new Minecrafters this is a pivotal point. If you do not have a basic understanding of what dark terrors await in the night you will die, and often.

His latest post shows just how far he’s come. I’m a Minecafter myself and I learned a lot from these posts and got some pretty cool ideas for my own projects. He also goes into more detail than just playing the game. He talks about modding and texture packs which are things some people don’t even mess with because they’re so confusing. He substantiates his posts with screen shot that really help with some of the processes… not to mention he adds a healthy dose of sarcasm with every post. You know, just to lighten the mood.

 Something I found particularly useful was his post about enchanting and what enchantments do what. He is obviously very dedicated to this project and has some enjoyment in what he’s doing. Good on you, sir. Good on you.

 

Thirdly we have Ryan Heilman’s wiki work on the Age of Fire series:

He had quite the job ahead of him when he started this project. I’m glad you admitted not knowing everything because with any six book series, it would be impossible. A lot of the recent wiki activity has been you so it looks as if you’re pretty much on your own with this one. I did some research and the work have done is excellent! It’s very informative and doesn’t fluff anything. It gets straight to the point and if I were looking the Ghi-men up, that is exactly what I’d want. Once again, long series like this need these wiis to help fans and newcomers out as much as possible so on behalf of all the people who actually use these, thank you.

You still have a lot of work ahead of you, but so far so good! 

 

 

Weekly Review: RuneScape Edition Pt. 3

This week, to put it frankly, was a shit-show. I only finished three posts, the video I meant to publish wouldn’t convert to the proper file type, and as usual I seen to be doing fine in every other class but this one. Here are my three posts for the week:

• Breaking of the blood pact.
• Dealings with weird people and frog armies.
• Damnit, Drezel. (Pt.1)

I’m doing plenty of things wrong, as always. Nothing went according to plan so I don’t expect any thing good to come of this week.

Next week, I’m blogging ahead of time and scheduling when the post will be posted so as to meet the time-requirements. Saturday at 1pm, there is an RS party I will be attending so that will definitely be entertaining.

I will continue to take screen recordings of my gameplay and will find a way to make them work. I don’t have any massive projects due this week (unlike the two that were due last week) so I will have more time to look into this option.

I am attempting to schedule another RS party with more people. Also, this week I am going to record the podcast. I won’t have it edited and ready to go this week but next Wednesday it will be published.

Weekly Review: RuneScape Edition Part II

This week’s posts:

1. Free cake, killing cows, and tackling the Grand Exchange.
   
2. Hides on hides on hides.
3. The deep desert is not fun.
4. The deep desert s still not fun.
5. Game with a friend.

This week was a toughy but I upped my word counts:

1. 1229 words.
2. 953 words.
3. 958 words.
4. 805 words.
5. 958 words.

By expanding my word count I am being more thorough. I also hit my post total goal for the week. I may not have done everything on the allotted day but I made sure I made up for it. Every time I play is a new adventure so I never run out of things to say. I take more screen shots than I have to and the file on my computer is quite full. Everyday I get more likes and more views. I post on both my personal Twitter account and on Potam’s. Potam’s Twitter is gaining followers. The blog has three followers.

Next week I am implementing a blog roll and I am going to reference more blogs in upcoming posts: time to outsource! I will also increase my interactions with the other players in RS instead of just leveling all the time.

Otherwise, there isn’t anything new to report. This week was much the same as the week before.

The weekly review: RuneScape edition

I recently began my expedition throughout the RuneScape world while posting anythign I’ve learned, the adventures I had and whatnot. It was a relatively quiet week since Potam, the character I created is still in her early levels.

The Terms and Conditions

This was my introductory post to inform any potential readers what exactly it was that I would be doing. I had a comment on it from a fellow player which is always a confidence boost. I ran into a few issues when I tried to add a recurring music player to the blog. Apparently I have to pay more money which was definitely not going to happen.

Let’s begin, shall we?

This is how I created Potam. I go through the step by step process, describing my experience and comparing it to what the old edition of RuneScape was like. I tried a couple of new things for this post. I wanted to add in a couple of screen shots all in a row along the bottom but I couldn’t quite figure out how until I discovered the gallery view. This make the post look much more put together. I also threw in a poll at the bottom to make it more interactive.

Graduated. Now what?

Potam is finally out of the Tutorial there are a couple of things I had to go into quite a bit of detail on so I didn’t get very far on the recording of Potam’s adventures. As for meeting new people, I met one person and we had a conversation that lasted about thirty seconds. Next week I will be moving to more populated worlds so as to increase these interactions.

What a load of lodestones.

This post I also did not go into detail about Potam but I did address certain things any new player may be confused about like lodestones. It was hard to choose the screen shots for this post considering there were so many. I think I might try making a gallery of extra shots at the very end if this happens again. That way if anyone would like to have more information on something, all my data is there.

I also began a Twitter account for this character and you can follow it here for post updates as well as RS updates.

Some issues I had this week:

1. The fact that Twitters new widget for streaming tweets via a search term does not work and hasn’t been working for the past six months. I spent hours trying to find a way around this but I guess it just isn’t going to happen for me.
2. My music issue was annoying but I can see how it’s for the best. Not everyone wants to listen to RuneScape ambiance.
3. At one point my computer crashed because I was running too many programs. I now have to play RuneScape, take notes, and then go on WordPress and record them.

I look forward to seeing where this bog can go.

 

The Weekly Reflection. Again.

Hey guys, so this week we transitioned over to the wikis portion of the class so I made the bulk of my review on my wiki page. I link to my inputs on other wikis, my creation of The Memex page, my top four, and some outsiders referencing my posts (which I am über pumped about). It’s nice to see information being passed on beyond the boundaries of this Weblogs and Wikis community. I feel like I’m finally contributing something to the world. Feel free to check things out.

Cheers.

The top four: time to pick favorites.

Let’s start off with Rachel’s reaction to blogs and their freedom of speech:

She addresses the different types of blog posts as well as the strong stereotypes that accompany them. I completely agree with her here:

In some situations people may have taken their “freedom of speech” a little too far.

I think this is a huge issue with the internet, especially with this “BSU Confessions” fad hitting Facebook. For right now, the negativity is minimal however, once it turns into a Burn Book it’ll lose its credibility. The same goes for anyone anywhere. Another reason why I feel Rachel did a good job covering this topic. You see, it’s not just where blogging is going popularity-wise but also how people are going to incorporate it into their day to day lives. Will this be a negative or a positive? We can only wait and see.

Next we have Jack’s Tiki-Toki timeline of the future:

I really loved how he incorporated Axel Bruns at the very end and how we will write a new book. Very clever. Also, I thought it was very interesting how freelance blogging from home. More and more people are declaring they’re self-employed so I think this is a real possibility. One of the creepiest ideas to me was the YouTube bit about identifying everyday citizens from their videos. I picture the Facebook face finder but for videos… chills. Apparently I’m a little behind because I had no idea what Twitter Bootstrap was so I had to Google it. Hmm, learn something new everyday.

Third on the list would be Joe’s interesting link-jobs in his digital artifact:

I was never familiar with the phrase “digital goldfish” so that was something new I learned. There is also the point of the evolution of technology and how blogging is so closely linked with technological innovations. As long as blogging continues to evolve to suit the online tools of the times, it’s here to stay.

Fourthly we have Matt’s timeline, also on Tiki-Toki:

Unlike Jack’s approach, where Google began filtering out the blogs with shorter posts, Matt looked at the future as Facebook turns blogging obsolete with its longer posts. The government getting involved was definitely a radical approach but, hey, it’s the future! Who knows? Maybe the next big thing will be the internet Civil Rights movement. And the part about the freelance writers turning to blogging, I can totally see that happening and its kind of scary.

The Sunday post: (Week 6)

Alright people, let’s do this thing. I’m running a little late tonight and my excuses are worthless anyway so I won’t waste your time. I didn’t get to post a lot this week but I at least got the assignments completed!

As usual, I tried the whole lecture note approach as well as mentioning all the things that popped into my head whilst reading. My Tuesday and Wednesday posts were on chapter 18 and 19 in Uses of Blogs. The first one, titled Penguins, meth and vampires. Oh my! focused primarily on fictional blogging and throughout the post I used a lot more links than I have in my past posts.Oh, and I actually used some things I’ve experienced through Twitter… Which is weird. Maybe Prof. Morgan was right: academia now owns Twitter. Isn’t that a scary thought? As much as I’d like Twitter to go academic, I think I’ve experienced too many negative things with Twitter. To me, Twitter = workings of the devil, whatever you feel correlates with a horrible thing that should be exorcised from the internet.

Sorry, Morgan. I know I’m going off topic. So Wednesday’s post was appropriately titled How  things have changed since 2007 plus a goat. This chapter was mainly about the different genres of blogging as well as the different mediums. For instance, podcasting and videocasting. I went head to head with the author here. I had quite a few things to say about his claims that videocasting was incapable of hyperlinking. I respectfully disagreed. Personally, I really enjoyed having a valid point for once. It was a great feeling. People should do that more often.

I perused  the posts of others in the class, such as Matt’s annoyance with the amount of links on a video (I told you there were links in videos!) and Jake’s views of blogging used as a notebook.

Finally we have my own digital artifact of sorts about what I see as the future of blogging. I tried something new this week. Joe suggested I make it into a picture book. I wouldn’t mind doing this all the time. There is nothing better than writing with scented markers. It was fun tracking the history of blogs and then accelerating the now periodic use to a more extreme measure. I have very mixed views of social networking so I got to let some of that shine through.

My life is a pile of busy from now on so I just have to keep holding on by this thread. Maybe next time I’ll try these super cool 3D pens instead of scented markers.

Cheers.

What’s next for blogging: I try to predict the future.

In The Beginning: [1980]

THERE WAS USENET! What’s that? Well, basically some guys made a world wide discussion board.

Then we can journey through 1994-2001:

In addition to just an “online diary,” blogs introduced entirely new tools only available through the web: permalinks, blogrolls, and trackbacks.

Then comes the politics: [2001-2004]

Now people can give live/public commentary on their favorite political happenings!

Keying up to the present: [2004-now]

WHAT DO WE DO NOW?! WHAT’S NEXT?!

Certain questions will be answered: what makes “the perfect” blog?

Blogging will become a way to portray your personality. If you seem to be a generally likable person in your posts, more people will support you.

Instead of petty judgments being thrown out face-to-face in direct confrontations, they will be thrown out blog-to-blog.

Everything will be considered an experiment.

Soon, all forms of communication will be done through the blogosphere. Instead of langage barriers, there will be coding errors. “HTML” will be used in everyday web conversation. People will be more afraid of the network crashing than the market crashing. Even worse, hashtags will be everywhere. #SpringBreak2003

Or…

Blogging will fade away like the tamagotchi you never fed.

*All information from sections In The Beginning through Keying up to the present (a.k.a. the historical sections) came from here. Thank you Wikipedia! This is why I give you money every once in a while.

How things have changed since 2007 plus a goat.

Chapter Nineteen: A Vision for Genuine Rich Media Blogging

Blogging is not just about text and the written word. There are different mediums out there for everyone to try. For instance, podcasting: basically blogger radio. They can cover they news just like any other radio station but they can be a little more specific in their topic choices. Just like any other blog, you can subscribe to receive any updated episodes. You’ll get all the sass, all the bias, all the technology, with none of the reading… or the linking. Personally, I’m not the largest fan of podcasting but I can respect the art nonetheless.

Then there is what the book calls “videocasting” which, I have also heard, can be called “vlogging.” Actually there are a lot of things me and this book do not agree on. Maybe because it was written in 2007. Who knows? Maybe I’m just wrong. Anyway, the book describes videocasting as a lot like podcasting: there are people and they are talking in a blog-like manner. On the other hand, the author (this chapter is by Adrian Miles) claims there is no way for videos and podcasts to hyperlink, no way for them to cite their sources, so to speak. At least, there is no easy way to do it. Thus we are left with the comparison that videocasting and podcasting are like those book-on-tapes you’d listen to on road trips with your parents or old ski coaches. You know, with podcasting I could actually agree with that comparison. You’re listening to an mp3 file and that is pretty much all there is to it.

HOWEVER, with videocasting/vlogging there have been quite the innovations. If you have uploaded any YouTube videos at all lately you might have noticed the options to… (drum roll, please)… ADD LINKS.  That’s right, everyone, TECHNOLOGY IS POWER. And it’s relatively easy, too.

Like always, there’s a catch. You can’t put external links on your video itself unless you’re a YouTube partner. There are loopholes for this, though. In the “About” section of your video (usually found beneath the video itself) you can link wherever you want. For instance, SourceFed has a link to their other videos embedded in their video at the very end however, they have to link to their external sources below in the “About” section.

BOOM. If that isn’t technological innovation at its finest, I don’t know what is.

I know… there are probably better examples out there. Just accept me. Please. Or not. You know. Whatever floats your goat.