I spent some time this afternoon (approx. ten mins so far) playing with Twitter. Alison’s been telling us about it for months now and I’ll admit that I finally did it, not because of her, but because a favorite actor of mine has one and I wanted updates! : ) Typical of me, right?

In all honesty, though, technology is awesome and makes my life better (and faster). And really, it’s not all that difficult. Within the last few weeks, I’ve learned some PHP and how to create a forum using MySQL. Some other members of my technology group have created galleries using javascript, ajax, and more! I’m amazed at the things we have accomplished over these weeks. I’m confident we will do amazing things with technology as we work on our project. I look forward to learning more. 

In class I keep pushing Utterz for our site. You can text, leave voice messages, pictures, etc to your Utterz account and place widgets on your WordPress, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and even directly to your website. I think this is really cool! I’m sure there are variations of this around already. Personally, I know that LiveJournal has the capabilities to post voice and text messages straight to your journal but with Utterz, you can have widgets and players in multiple places and update them all at once. That’s easy and way awesome, in my opinion. I haven’t used it personally, as in uploading something, but I’ve listened to what others have ‘uttered’ with the technology. Recently I began using an open source FTP client, Cyberduck, in order to connect to my server for our forums. Previously, I had been using the embedded FTP client at GoDaddy, where my server is hosted, and let me tell you, FTP clients are the way to go. You have so much more control and access. Granted, I wasn’t using the embedded for much more than hosting pictures and a few personal websites, but the speed and everything else is way better with a client. Obviously, I’m way behind on figuring this out but whatever, I’m happy about my discovery. Last year I needed (well, wanted) to have my own hosting/server space so I bought some from GoDaddy. It took me about a full day of tearing my hair out but I eventually figured out how to work things. Having that little bit of experience really helped when the time came to create some prototype forums for my class. 

 ”If we give people what they say they want, they’ll never get what we know they need.”       

 This is the constant struggle we designers know so well. I know all of us GRDE students have experienced this more times than we can count and we’re only students! I don’t believe there can be a perfect solution to this problem because design is so subjective. It’s scary because we’ve been taught to think about design first; the principles of design, typography, layout, etc. Now it seems like design will have to take a back seat to the technologies and coding, which is okay because that’s what makes the sites work. The article linked in Alison’s post quoted Amazon.com’s CEO Jeff Bezos, saying, “Web 2.0 … is about making the Internet useful for computers.” The article also said all of this change “means designers need to become more like programmers. Web 2.0 is a world of thin front ends and powerful back ends.” I don’t know if any of my classmates feel similar but that’s intimidating. The amount of time we spend focusing on web in our program is not nearly enough if we’re supposed to become programmers as well as designers, especially for the few of us who want to pursue careers on the web side for design. To be honest, I believe we’re biting off more than we can chew for this one class. However, isn’t that usually when the best designs happen? Born from blood and sweat? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I try to be hopefully. The things that can be done on the web now are amazing and that makes me excited to discover what we can do as a group but at the same time, it’s a little nerve wracking to take on such a large task.