Analysis of the topic

Isn’t it what you’ve been waiting for? My take on the course work topic. In our school we have to choose Module D. The following is the topic.

Module D (Multimedia Production and Web Authoring): Personal Portals

Personal portals are gaining increasing attention from Internet content providers and surfers. A user can customize a web page hosted by a personal portal publisher (e.g. Xanga.com) to include information and materials according to his/her own needs or taste. The web page may then act as the entry point for the user to access various resources on the Internet.

Candidates are required to

(1) Discuss what features/technology should be provided by a personal portal publisher to facilitate user customization and how these features/technology should be evaluated. Study and compare the features/technology offered by two existing personal portal publishers.

(2) Suppose that your school would like to set up a personal portal for each student. Propose the features/technology that should be provided for the students to design their own student personal portal. The proposed elements should contain multimedia materials and interactive features.

With a preset profile of two or more students, design a personal portal for each student which includes the proposed features/technology and illustrate the layout of the design in the form of web pages.

Suggested time allocations for Part (1) and Part (2) are 30% and 70% respectively.

Interesting, eh? Now getting down to business. Serious questions:

1. What is a “personal portal”?
2. Xanga? Am I making a Xanga clone?
3. Features/technology? Discuss? Study and compare? Hm…
4. It’s the school wanting to give students these “personal portals” (PP from here on). How to stop silly students posting silly things?
5. “Design their own student PP”! The internet is going to be ugly.
6. Multimedia! OMG. Flash? *faint*
7. Interactive! Oh. Do we have the skills?
8. “Design a PP for each student.” Oh dear, we’re making two PPs or what?
9. “Illustrate”! What a key word this is.
10. “Web pages”. That means more than one pages. Doh.

Ah, what a nice little list. We have questions, we obviously need answers. There are no model answers, but since you’re here, don’t you just prefer my answers?

1. As the only example of PP in the topic is Xanga, what Xanga is is a PP. What’s Xanga? A blog provider. Conclusion: PP is blog. I have another question now: who on earth invented this term “personal portal”? Who doesn’t know the word “blog” nowadays? Why do we need this new term?
2. Xanga clone? Possibly. It can be used as a model, at least. You make something like a Xanga, you’re not too far off.
3. This is a big, big question. Probably I shouldn’t have put it all in one question. Features, these are what the users can see and use. Like blog, comments, RSS feeds, photo slideshow, videos. Technology, that’s what is behind the features. Like RSS is the technology behind your magically updating feeds. Like you have PHP and a database (or more, I don’t know) behind your blogs and comments. Discuss. According to my dear Oxford dictionary, it can mean talk or write. I wonder what it means here. Anyway, study and compare. You do have to write it down. I think I will write some paragraphs and use tables to sum up.
4. Big problem. The education is not doing much to stop these silly and often stupid students. What do we do? We can use word filters, like how people catch spam? Good suggestion, but how can I put it in our HTML based web pages? It’s unlikely that I will ever learn the technology necessary for this. How about employ some tech teachers to do this for all the student PPs? That’s costly. That’s not tech enough. So un-CIT.
5. Duh, this is for the eyes of numerous fellow students and some other unlucky guys that happens to stumble upon PPs of those students that have no design talents. No way we can save these people I guess. Rest in peace.
6. *Faint again* What things do we have for multimedia other than Flash? Multimedia, that’s pictures, music, videos, and everyone’s favourite, Flash animations. Are we going to make a page showing pictures? Link to illegal music downloads? Copy codes from YouTube? Make your very own Flash animation? I have no idea how to get pass this one.
7. Interactive, makes me think of PHP. It’s impossible for me to learn PHP, right? Too tough! We’re not expected to know PHP, are we? So what else can we do? Currently I have put a shoutbox from a service called ShoutMix. It’s pretty good, but I’m not sure if there are rules that says you can’t use anyone else’s services. It’s exam after all. All work should be my own.
8. That sentence means making two or more PPs to me, but our teacher seems to think not. He said a lot of things about it, but I just don’t understand what he means. It’s a mystery. For now I’m making one PP. It’s not like I have time for another PP now.
9. “Illustrate”. The teacher said a lot of things about this as well. I understand his point on this. We’re not really making PPs. We’re not really making software to let students make their own PPs. We’re just illustrating our designs. We can pretend. We can fake. My only problem is I think I’ll abuse this. I’ll make forms that is going nowhere. Then if the teacher tests out the web pages, he will know. Don’t know if this is permitted.
10. You’re not just making one page. Well, I think it’s impossible to make just one page.

Very well. Questions answered. Bear in mind these are all my opinions. You have your own answers? Feel free to share in the comments.