Month: June 2013

Mashup Assignment FlickrSounds

DS106 students do not have much time left the clock is ticking…

This started as a riff on some cogdogfoo flickrSounds for #ds106 as a way of producing comic-strips of images and sounds. It gave me an opportunity to play with the flickr and free sound APIs.

It developed into a sort of slideshow of images and sound, a couple of examples.

To create a slideshow

  1. go to flickrSounds. Put in a word to search for
  2. When the image and sound load you can see alternatives by clicking he image or waveform
  3. When you have one you like click Add to Preview
  4. Repeat with more words
  5. When you have finished click Save as AV slides
  6. This will show you your slideshow and give you a bit of html to put into your blog (you need to be on text/html rather than Visual in the blog editor.

I do not think you can use iFrames in a wordpress.com blog but it should work fine on a self hosted wordpress blogs.

I’ve found that sound phrases, eg, tick tock or ‘drip drip drip’ are easier to get a reasonable result from than a quote.

I use one for my 404 here.

If I was counting I’d get stars for this and for creating a tutorial;-)

Levelling up to the LoDown

I made a quick recording in response to ds106zone LoDown 019. Scott played a section on ds106zone LoDown 020.
Recording made in garageband on iphone, I sent Scott the audio with the large room preset. This one is reset to dry so less echo.

As I say, I’ve missed ds106 for the last week, being away on holiday. Other than a couple of daily creates, I just kept up by listening to the lodown. This is sterling stuff, great fun, audio tips and ScottLo’s special sauce.

I was hoping to do some of the audio stuff this time round the ds106 but timeing was out. I might try and run a couple of ds106 bits of audio or go over some audio assignments. I do a fair bit of audio week to week, but not in the same zone as DS106. Last time round at Camp Magic MacGuffin I really enjoyed working on the group audio task which I didn’t expect given its subject matter.

I made the recording on GarageBand on my phone. Very straightforward. I’ve not used GarageBand much on iOs although I’ve used it a fair bit for podcasting on a mac and in very basic music making with pupils using the loops. One of the nice things about GB is that you can upload straight to Soundcloud. A disadvantage is the lack of MP3 export which is better for creating podcast episodes for maximum compatibility (pace firefox on the mac). This is a problem common to quite a few audio editors on iOs only a few export to mp3. I’ve tended to use audioboo for on the fly podcasting, some of the good things about audioboo include support mp3s, RSS and an API.

An extra audio tip

As my minds starts t owander as I type this post I remember an extra tip about audioboo.
One of the problems on embeding a boo into a blog to
like this:

listen to ‘The Real David Cameron on Neo-Liberalism and Education’ on Audioboo

Is that the mp3 does not get added as an enclose to your blog so cannot be listened to on a podcatcher on, say, a mobile device.

to do this you need to take an extra step.
First get the url of the audioboo page:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1190812-the-real-david-cameron-on-neo-liberalism-and-education
and add a .mp3 extension to it:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1190812-the-real-david-cameron-on-neo-liberalism-and-education.mp3
click on the add Media button in your wordpress editor (only wp afaik)

There click on the insert from url link and paste in the url of the mp3. insert that into the post: audio link added via add media
and wordpress will create an enclosure. Folk can now subscribe to your blog in a podcatcher, itunes, instacast on iOS etc and hear your boos.

More than one way to frame a gif

DarknessMirroreyes2oAimEyesArmsDozeoffAntsFacefearJumpout

 

 

I’ve done a fair number of Multi-Frame GIF Story Assignments and I really like them. One thing I do not like is having to have each animation at the same rate and with the same number of frames. You can work round this by ‘freeze’ framing a particular frame or several frames, but I quite like the idea of the gifs all going at their own rate and not moving in sync.

After I’d giffed a few from Perchance to Dream I though I’d try a slightly different approach. I’ve uploaded all the gifs, but instead of inserting them I created a bit of html to show the gifs.

  1. For each gif I found out its url, eg http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/darkness.gif
  2. I then created a img tag for each gif: <img src=”http://johnjohnston.info/106/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/darkness.gif” alt=”Darkness”>
  3. I edit the post, putting the code to show each gif inside a single div tag, that tag has a class:
  4. <div class=”gifgrid”> then a list of the gif tags </div>
  5. I put in a style snippet to scale the gifs to one third of the space they are in each: <style>.gifgrid img{width:33%;float:left}</style>
  6. I made sure there were no returns in the code.
  7. I switched the blog editor to code vive and pasted in the code.

I’ve put the code into an external page too, if you want to have a look: perchance_grid , where you can easily view the code.

Perchance to Dream has been my favourite episode so far. I’ve not left enough time to write much about it and I’ll be stepping out of the ds106zone for the next week, which means I’ll miss audio week. I might join in the odd daly create, but if not I’ll be back in the zone next weekend.