The Search Engine experience

I actually enjoyed learning about search engines because it's something we use every day. It's cool to see how it works and how Google/Yahoo/Bing/Whatever determines how your website is ranked. Scott Bothel came into our class explaining that websites generally rank websites by these factors:

• Back links
• Quality of work within the site
• Key words (at least they used to be relevant with search engines)
• A couple other smaller things

We then had to create our own sample webpage, which I did here.

My "oh don't forget" experience

My overall process of creating the "oh don't forget" presentation went quite smoothly.

I first started out by searching "Cool Web applications." I then proceeded to scroll down the page and browse through all of the available web applications. I wanted something simple, but not overly boring or shallow.

Eventually, I came to select the "oh don't forget" application, an app you can learn about in my presentation in the blog post below. Me and Jackson Connell chose to use Google Docs in the making of our slideshow, mainly because in enables us to work in it at the same time.

The process of creating it through Google docs was easy, especially considering I had already done it before. With our App being simple, the slides required little hard work.

A lot of people struggled with putting the right Web address on their blog, but that was not a problem for me. I have done all this before, so it was fairly easy.

What I learned this week 2/7 - 2/10

• The History of the Internet. I was suprised at the intial size of the internet, with it only having 4 computers to start with. The rate of new computers every year was shocking, bascily doubling every time. I never knew that TCP-IP came later in the internet, and that it really was used for idenifing computers. This portion of the class was suprisingly interesting to me.

• The process of creating a Website. Before this lesson, I thought creating a good website was only a few clicks away, and that you didn't have to know much to create one. Boy was I wrong. I discovered it takes a lot of knowledge and understanding to make one. What you do is type in a bunch of codes to tell the computer to make a picture or something, and it does it. Seems like a really hard thing to do, and I have a newfound repect for people who create one.

• Client Side and Server Side. Now THIS is what's useful. Before I thought that every problem on the Internet had to do with the computer, and that there was a virus in it or something. But now I realize that some problems relating to the internet are related to the server. Let's say I'm visiting a website amd click on a link. If the website crashes or something, I can't blame my computer for that, I rather should blame the server my computer is communicating with.