Posted 11:47 PM by Melissa
Well its another friday night and I'm home doing nothing as usual. Working on this hypertext wasn't as bad as I had expected. I'm actually enjoying it. Let's see what else can i talk about. I am still in search of a job for the summer. I've already registered for my classes for the summer. I'm taking Cal 1, speech, and intro to sociology. I am also very excited about getting all the classes I wanted for the fall. I am glad that for the fall I wont have any calss on Friday. Earlier I told you that I wanted these classes but Im so excited that I atually got it. For the fall im taking physics A, and the lab, cal 2, theory of football(I heard its easy and sounds kinda interesting), intro to the new testament( satisfy the lit requirement), intro to c programming, adn the engineering lab. I am kind of torn between majors. I am think about chaning my major from computer engineering to computer science. I really want to deal with software, and become a software engineer. In order to do so I must go through the comp sci department, with the engineering school they focus mainly on hardware. In the fall im taking both the engineeirng laba nd programming class to see what I really waht to do. well i think im going to bed now. I have a philosphoy paper(ugh!) to do! later.

Posted 3:13 PM by Melissa
I cant believe that there are only 6 days of class plus a week of finals left. This semester went by soooooooooooooo slow, I thought it was never going to be over. Well when its over I will be able to say I have completed my first year in college. As I look back it has been quite a year, with a few regrets :-(. Anyway I remember being extremely excited about entering college, living in an apartment with two of my friends. It all started of so great, and perfect, almost too perfect, which surely changed. Well at the end of the year, i ended up with only one of my roomies. I am really ready to go home (not sure how im getting there yet). I am going to be going to summer school in the evenings so that I can work in the days, to make some money honey, lol. Yea well last summer I didn’t find a job and I was sure looking. Well i did really really good on my trig test this past Monday, failed the precal one and got like a c on my chem test. I'm hoping they made a mistake on the chem test or something, cause i thought i did real good. well lets see, i need to be typing my paper, since it is due tomorrow. I think its coming together ok. I need to rewrite it a little.

Posted 12:05 PM by Melissa
Jean Mason on Hyperwriting

This reading was very helpful to me since we are in the process of writing our hypertexts. It's good that we can read something and really put it into practice, to see what works and what doesn't. He gives some strategies that we should implement when creating these websites. He's a fan of Frontpage, I worked with it once while in high school, it was pretty easy. Anyway he talks about considering your target audience when creating the webpage.

He poses questions like: "How can we inform the reader where the links lead?" I think he means how can we get readers to want to go in another direction, by being as clear as possible. You don't want the reader to follow the link and then they realize they don't want to be there. Informing readers where links lead is a great benefit of hypertext, because of the choices you are given. If the creator of the website isn't clear about the links, then they defeat the purpose.

There are some preliminary things to consider before creating a hypertext, for example, as I mentioned before, your audience. You must keep in mind who you are writing to, not that it has to limit your creativity, but for the success of the text you should keep that in mind. Also what is the purpose of this hypertext. This is similar to even writign a piece, using paper and pencil, you must have a purpose for writing. I like when Mason says "when it comes to hypertext I need to realize the bigger picture." You have to like vision what you want to make of the web piece before actually putting it to work.

He mentions an important point that "no more than one third of a screen should be devoted to text; the rest should be visual." No one is going to enjoy a text only site, no matter how informative it is. Well maybe not everyone, but for the most part people like colors and pictures, so bring your page to life with some sort of visuals.