Final Project Wireframes

Hi everyone,

Here are some of the wireframes for my final project:

My latest vision for the project is a news feed aggregator that would resemble the top picture to the right. It's a bit like Netvibes and a bit like Google reader. The main difference between this and existing aggregators is that this one will have multi-column format that's simple to glance through. You won't have to click on links to see the headlines. You only click if you want to read the whole article.

As you can see in the picture, each item will have some nav icons (the ones in the wireframe are just temporary) that will give the reader three options... 1. go to the article now 2. star the article and save it to a reading list... 3. close the article and hide it from view.

Another thing I am thinking about is whether to have all the items be various heights (as in picture #1 and #2) or whether to impose a standard size (as in picture #3). I'm leaning towards the various sizes, but I think it would be both easier and maybe more elegant if everything isthe same size. When I get further along, I'll probably mock up both ways and see which works better.

An important aspect of the site is the reading of the articles. In picture #4, you can see how I envisioned it. I really wanted to have the ability to keep my site on top and let it help the reader navigate through all the articles that were starred. I wanted to have the original article show up in a frame that people could comment on. However, I did some research and it seems that many news sites specifically forbid doing this with their pages. (D'oh!) So, I'm still pondering what to do. I might have just comments on the click through page (kind of like the way digg and reddit work).

Depending on what we go over in the next class, I would like to also incorporate some social networking aspects into the site. I would like to be able to show people the feeds based on most popular of the day/week/etc... (Does that count as something social?)

I'm not sure if I'm biting off too much or not. So far it seems doable! I guess we'll see.

I would love any comments you guys would care to share! Thanks!

My RSS Feeds

RSS is now working with both the Blog and the Image Uploader.

Final Project

I'm really enjoying thinking about all the different possibilities for the Final Project. I find myself first thinking about the audience I want to attract and then trying to formulate a page to fit that crowd. So far, I have lots of ideas and all of them are vague. It's hard to choose! At first I really wanted to do more food pictures, but now I am leaning towards something more newsy.

I would like to make a news page that shows you top headlines at a glance in a more pictorial format than usual. My main issue is that I am unsure where one gets news from! I hope to get some advice about whether this is feasible in class tomorrow. I might also focus it on a specific subject if that makes content easier to get. Hopefully, I'll be better able to make a decision once I have more information.

If that does not work out, I have this whole sideways internet idea that I'll tell you guys about.

My Blog...

After using blogs so often now, it's kind of neat to make your own.

Mine is located at http://onepotcooking.com/sharonnikfarjam/class8/sharonblog/

It's an eyesore, but I think it's working. It has the logging in and stores usernames with comments and posts.

Things to do:

• Clean up some stray code leftover from Amos' examples that I used
• Make it pretty
• Add some functionality so that users can only edit/delete their own comments and posts
  

Please feel free to test. Let me know if anything seems off.

Favicons

Hi everyone,

I found this really neat Favicon generator that I had to share.

http://www.favicon.cc/

Check it out!

Shocked! It's working!

Beyond all belief, my uploader is working!!! I cannot describe the shock and joy I felt when I finally got something to upload. I seriously did not think it would ever happen.

When I first started thinking about this project, I decided to make mine an uploader for Icon files rather than just photos. I did this because icons files are really small, nice-looking, and I have a ton of them on my computer. Plus, I thought it would be nice to have a theme.

Unfortunately this project was too intimidating to do from scratch and I had to study both Jack and David's pages intensely. I owe a big thanks (and maybe an apology?) to both of them. My pages are a mishmash of both of their coding. I understand it pretty well, but I think there's no way I could have done this without their "help".

The only part I feel really great about is the fact that the navigation actually works and seems to correctly pull 50 images at a time. It's nice to finally figure out something without help. Hopefully, in time, I will be able to create more things like this on my own.

So here's my page. It's called ICONography.

I tried to get the lightbox effect to work, but so far no luck. That's my next goal.

PS - In case anyone actually reads this, I might be late tomorrow morning. I heard the LIRR will have delays because of construction work or something. Ugh.

Conflicting Cookies

I would like to suggest to everyone that we all try to set cookies for just our own subdirectories on the onepotcooking.com domain. I think it would be helpful in preventing cookies that may conflict with each other's sites (especially since many of us are using cookies with the same names).

So basically, instead of:
$cookiePath = "/"

you might put this:
$cookiePath = "/yournamehere/"

I'm using this and it seems to work:
$cookiePath = "/sharonnikfarjam/class7"

Too Distracted

Every time I try to work on my assignment, I find myself getting completely distracted by thoughts of the election. This is horrible! Did everyone vote today?