#nmp2012

Really enjoyed this, reminded me of other contemporary western like No country For Old Men. Fascinating story and tale of redemption. TLJ does a great job a the good guy doing bad things and Barry Pepper does an excellent wimp. Wonderful setting. The nonlinear narrative and different viewpoints worked very well. Just a really good neo-western movie.

This film seems to be split into two parts, it starts off all funny and quirky which is all too reminiscent of Borat with it's take on the Central European stereotype, but then the tone shifts dramatically with a heartfelt trip to the past when they meet the old woman. What didn't help my experience with this film was the lack of subtitles, which make it slightly harder to understand Russian, which was basically the main language in the film. Not understanding what was going on was very confusing, but it made me appreciate with what Elijah Wood's character was going through. I really like Eugene Hutz and all the other kooky characters and cinematography looked cool. Protip: watch with english subtitles to enjoy it more than I did.

Very emotional film with amazing character depth. Uses the actors abilities greatly. PSH is just great as lead, and also does a superb job directing this as well. Just very character driven, well it was adapted from a play I spose. Really really good soundtrack, adds even more emotion to movie. Yeah just good all round, would like to see what he could do if he wasn't so focused on his acting, let his directorial skills shine through.

Nasty nasty film. So much swearing, pretty much every single sentence. Ray Winstone does his part perfectly, so brutal to his pregnant wife. Didn't seem to have much of a story to start off with, but it worked out later on. Lots of stuff seems to happen off screen. Hard to follow what's happening sometimes. Don't really like the ending, she forgives him after all the shit he puts on her? Handheld camera makes this film so realistic. Such a dirty film, but pretty compelling.

Fairly different to the new ones (apart from the Danny Ocean character) so that's pretty cool. And damn what a cool film, with the ensemble Rat Pack breezing through this film effortlessly in their suits just being as slick as possible. Great story and heist plot and ideas. I just love horrible endings to movies and these guys majorly stuff up after being so perfect for the entire film. Damn cool cool stuff, I probably enjoyed the 2001 version more though. 

The concept for my page,  Psytrance culture, was to try and tackle the subject using dynamic images and sound (to help represent a psychedelic theme). Choosing the colour scheme and background did not go without thought. Settling on the deep red fractal background, while relating to the subject area but still not overpowering, as I found with many other psychedelic style backgrounds.

The page was designed using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Designing the 'header' image, as well as the 'home' menu display in Photoshop were very time consuming and adjusting the header width to match the background was something I encountered problems with. Finally by Re-Photoshopping with pixel perfect dimensions I was able to seamlessly integrate the header with the background.

The next step I took was too create the layout of the extra pages using Dreamweaver. By creating a container div, header div and main div I was able to separate the elements and structure the page.

 The actual menu bar itself was created using a spry menu on Dreamweaver + buttons I created using Photoshop. I found most information either from www.w3schools.com, various web forums or by getting help from a friend with web experience.

The first major issue I had was when I realised the home page was unable to be the first initial page. This was because the Tumblr blog was being assessed. The next best option was to add it an another additional  page. Also unfortunately I was un-able to re-attach the spry menu to the art / music / about page because of lack of time.

 Had time permitted I was planning to use sound samples taken from various psytrance song's as a roll over effect to each button on the 'home' menu. As well as extra images, representing sound waves coming from inside the speaker.

The music and art pages, suffered a strange problem when 'div align' tags failed to centre the pages. The music playing widget was chosen from www.grooveshark.com this free mp3 file sharing site was a perfect choice, having access to thousands of songs meant I didn't have to upload anything just select from their library. Meaning Tracks and playlist can easily be customized and changed. I was also able to create a Facebook 'like' button and found the coding for a browser icon for my extra pages.

The Art Page was also troublesome (working better on IE for unknown reasons), after experimenting with plenty of flash and Javascript image galleries, I finally managed to add a working flash gallery. By downloading and uploading the .swf file with appropriate images attached in flash, I was able to successfully add this to the page. A further thumbnail sized image gallery was included, from code found on w3schools.com. Unfortunately by adding this gallery to my main div , it caused the background to randomly end halfway through the page. I tried several unsuccessful methods to try to solve this, including background repeat in css and by re-arranging <div> </div> to no prevail. However on IE  I was able to overcome this difficulty.

 Data collected from Google Analytics from Tuesday 15th of May to Wednesday the 23rd of May showed the page accumulated 55 visits in that time. Interestingly with a wide range of demography, with visitors from, in descending order, Australia, the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Czech Republic, India, Italy and Slovenia. The blog attracted 90 followers since the start of semester, and blog post's received plenty of attention, with one image getting close to 600 re-blog's. The relatively low bounce rate of %34 was also a good indicator for the site.

Phew, it's nice to have changed this blog around and made it my own, without it being totally horrible on the eyes anymore. CSS was a lot easier to work with than I was expecting! Changing Tumblrs divs has given me some trouble though.

Most popular

Would have to be the funny Whitera poster from MLG Columbus, haha the sc2 community loves White-ra and it was from an ongoing event, streamed over the internet.

There's no way to get only that post in a link atmo so http://nozerglingleftbehind.tumblr.com/page/4 the photo near the top.

Overall traffic has been really slow, since I removed my theme I haven't focused on content as much as changing the css, I'm confident I can put out some interesting content soon now though. I'm really happy with the sc2 community I find here in tumblr, everyone's so positive about the game. Depressing posts wouldn't make it very far, I have a few followers, and I'm following several other sc2 sources, it's a keen community and a great place to blog an make friends.

2nd most popular/blogworthy

Would be the coaching one! I was surprised, but a lot of folks contacted me and took me up on it. Seems like a great way to make a name for myself with the blog that people are interested in. If I was a huge site, it definitely wouldn't be feasible to offer free coaching, but I think it'd be a great way to start making a name for myself if I manage to give some more popular bloggers or just friendly folks some help with their gameplay!

3rd most blogworthy

This one got me a fair bit of respect and interest from a few folks! I think there's a popular niche for a decent player trying to go pro on tumblr if said decent player can write well about what they're experiencing. Everyone wants to play like a pro! It's an awesome game! But you have to work soooooo hard for it. The struggles and the viewpoints are interesting!

Traffic

Very low but with a small spike around the White-ra post. 32% of my 111 page hits (since the 21st of April) have been kind enough to return! Understandable since the blog was under construction for a long while.

Grand finale

The technical side of making the blog has been a surprising amount of fun. Some of the tumblr specific css has stopped me from easily making it how I want it to be, but it's now pretty close. The community is awesome, and it's fun to think of things in terms of what'll interest people, and how can I write this to make it more interesting, what I can link in, the interesting posts others have done, compiling awesome starcraft tutorials.

Having a little time off is a brilliant way to clear the mind, it’s a shame we don't get the chance to just dive under the blankets more often.