The iLife for multimedia journalists

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Mar 11th, 2010 | 2 Comments

I have just recovered from helping to run “convergence” for nearly 80 MA journalism students here at Sheffield University, all producing WordPress web pages with video, audio slide shows and images.

With 90 PCs, not one of them can do a good job when producing multimedia content! It’s silly, but despite the endless Windows 7 (that was my idea, by the way, to have an over-complicated operating system) and PC World adverts for multimedia PCs, I don’t think PCs and MS Windows are made for doing media. Continue reading “The iLife for multimedia journalists” »

Video on the web

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Jan 15th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Video is popular

There’s no doubt that video on the web is popular. Youtube is quite popular (a bit of an understatement!) and google have for a while had a video tab on their home page. News websites are also providing more and more video, some of it is pretty crap, but nevertheless it adds value to their content.

Setting aside the online broadcasters like iPlayer, Youtube (as a website) and countless documentary sites, I’m interested in looking at the use of video within content. In particular in online news. Continue reading “Video on the web” »

Design woes

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Jan 14th, 2010 | No Comments

I’m not a web designer. I don’t pretend to be. But more and more I end up doing design as part of my projects, and I hate it!

I’m what some call a front-end developer, and what that means is that I can take a website concept, requirement and design and turn it into a functioning website. This might involve working out the best system (WordPress, Drupal, plain old html) and configuring it to suit needs. Then, taking a Photoshop design and cutting it up into bits, building a html and css frame and fitting the images into it. Continue reading “Design woes” »

Approaches to teaching web building

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Dec 11th, 2009 | 2 Comments

I’m involved in teaching MA web journalism students how to make websites. The aim of the initial module is for the students to build a simple website of five or six pages using simple html, pictures, audio and video. In the second semester they build a bigger group website, then go on to do a web portfolio site.

In the past I’ve  taught the students  Dreamweaver with a bit of photoshop. This was ok in the days when layout tables were acceptable, but trying to teach css layout using Dreamweaver (in layout view!) is near impossible. It’s fiddly, annoying and certainly not WYSIWYG! And in the last year I made a real effort to emphasise code view and how important it really is. I was suprised at how many students actually got it!

So now my new approach is this: Ditch Dreamweaver and write some code! Continue reading “Approaches to teaching web building” »

Hype, hyperlocal

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Dec 10th, 2009 | 3 Comments

A few days ago (December 8th, 2009), my good wife and myself attended the Derby Social Media Cafe at Deda in Derby. This event focused on hyperlocal websites and we had a talk from Will Perrin from http://talkaboutlocal.org and Philip John of The Lichfield Blog. Continue reading “Hype, hyperlocal” »

Oh, WordPress..

Posted by Hadrian Cawthorne in Blog on Nov 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments

After a good few years of being a hardened Drupal developer, I decided to revisit WordPress for a project to build a hyperlocal website for journalism students. Seeing that a vast number of local news websites are using WordPress, I just had to try. And I’m glad I did. Continue reading “Oh, WordPress..” »