Final Blog

This will be my last blog post for IS 449. You can really appreciate blogging because it creates questions and answers. Professor Drake encouraged us to stay on top of our blogs and with the blog counter created by Matt Mager , it made it a fairly accurate way of keeping up with you blogs and also your comments.

The hardest part for me was creating a blog making sure it had relevance to it. Any one of us can type on for days about hobbies, interest, concerns or general issues, but to write a blog pertaining to class or IT related news can be difficult at times. I read several blogs that helped me and my group for our iteration. With this being a writing intensive course, blogs are a major factor of your grade. This shows the importance to not to get behind with blogging.

For all my classmates who are graduating , I wish you the best of luck and hopefully EMU has prepared you for the workforce. Professor Drake I wish you continued success as you guide the youth who earn for higher education. I hope that everyone have a blessed and safe Holiday.

Best Wishes,

Justin Gantt

Iteration 3

Iteration 3 is finally over with. I personally like to thank each member from IJAM for all there hard work put into the project. I have learned how difficult it is to bring what you image to reality. We envisioned our website to work a certain way and ran into several obstacles.

In a perfect world, group projects would be no problem.There would be no conflict, no slacking, everyone would contribute and things would run smoothly according to schedule. But it's no such thing as a perfect world. I was lost for the last part of iteration 3 and tried to help out in any way possible for the team. After a email to our group Ivaylo shared with me the how difficult it was for everyone in the group and needed my support to work with other parts of the project.

Ultimately things worked out and the project got done to the best our ability.I do have to mention the other groups project looked and functioned very well. I really felt the mountain bike group was over the top and they did a hell of a job. The way they incorporated Wikipedia with Google maps was impressive. Lastly, I can't forget the sister group to IJAM which is called IRAM dating service check it out!!

Group Iteration 3

Well, I can say that we are almost there. We have the major APIs working, but still run in some bugs. Overall our group came from a long way, since we had limited knowledge in programming. The biggest issues we had was with the pointers on the google mapls, we could get only one. Hopefully by the iteration tonight we will be fine.

I found out while I was working on the ebay API that after you create an account they offer you a full set of develping tools. That is how I learned how to set up the API. It was really nice because I learned some really usefull tips.

Overall we understand the underlying idea of the progect and the techonology behind it. It is that we do not have the final touches. On the other side I do think that we had a really nice idea about the project, just could not fully implement it. Hopefully what we have is enoegh to get us a good grade.

Basic Web Design

I know we are almost finished with this class but here are some key points for designing websites in the future, of course containing mashups. Impressive, well laid out, fast loading and easy to use are all terms that describe a perfect website design. In order to attract a prospective visitor and maintain their interest in your site, it is vital to think about why users go there. The homepage is a customers first opportunity to form an immediate opinion about your website and determine whether or not they want to proceed any further. The main objective should be to design a webpage that is not only appealing to the eye, but also is easy to use.

Usually a homepage allows visitors to perform one of several different functions which may include reading the news, searching for information, watching videos or buying products. If you have too many links a customer can become easily overwhelmed and decide to abandon your site and search for another. One option to address that problem would be to use drop down menus which appear in a much cleaner format. Using "calls to action" through images, buttons or text links will also help a customer to easily navigate their way through your website. One of the key points to remember is that "less is more," when it comes to choosing font styles. In order to improve readability and add a sense of professionalism to your webpage design try not to incorporate more than three different font sizes.

Color is also another very important part of webpage design. Depending on what you are trying to project to your audience, webpages can contain many different colors. While designing our website, VacatioNation, we chose to apply the aqua blue color which normally projects the feeling of restfulness, relaxation and calmness and fits perfectly when thinking of vacations.

This was just a brief overview of the many different options you may want to incorporate into your own website design that will improve the functionality and enhance the overall look. There are also plenty of website tutorials online that may aid in the development of your next website.

Benefits of Blogging

This course is writing intensive and we are required to blog at the IS449 blog site shown below.

The idea is that knowledge discovery is aided by allowing the largest number of people to participate. Well thought out posts and intelligent comments lead to the greatest growth in knowledge to all involved.

It has been a few weeks now since we started blogging and the growth in knowledge is easy to see. Many of the blog posts have been a very helpful resource when working on our projects. There has been a variety of topics with useful information.

Thank you to all who have worked hard and took the time to share their ideas.

Internationlized Domain Names

Wikpedia states, "An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari or Hebrew." This example is an example of a greek IDN.

I have been following the news on this topic for about the past month and just heard today that ICANN has finally authorized a new plan that will allow web extensions and e-mail addresses to contain non-latin characters. This is a historic change considering that for over four decades only the latin character set has been accessible for IDNs. With this new announcement, there will be over 100,000 characters available that represent the various languages of the world.

ICANN felt this was a necessary step in order to expand the use of the worldwide web for people who do not understand English. Beginning November 16th, applications will be accepted for top level domains or internet extensions based on that nations character set. In the future, ICANN is hoping to incorporate the top level domains (i.e. .com, .org and .net) into the IDN system.

After years of testing, studying and discussing international domain names we will soon operate as a global, worldwide network! Make sure to click on this link, it's a great video and explains it all!

Individual Project

Well I made it through iteration 1 for our individual project. When I first started IS449 I didn't know anything about AJAX or how it worked. Now I'm begining to understand what this is all about.

For iteration 1 of our individual project we had to fetch a static file from our web server and integrate it into our web page. To do this we used xmlhttprequest, Javascript, and html. We also had to indicate what web service API's we plan to use for our project.

My site is just a simple application showing how I retrieved today's date and time from the server by clicking a button and bringing it back to display that information within the same page. I plan to form my project as a site for finding and discussing information about vitamins and health food stores. I may have to make some changes as I move forward but it seems to be a good start.

Yippie W3

I realized in class that many of us don't have prior knowledge of JavaScript and needed a little help to understand it better. Dr. Drake recommended checking out w3schools to find information that can help us to learn JavaScript and other topics we are covering in this course.

The w3schools site has been an extremely helpful resource. They have web building tutorials, examples, references, and certificates.

The tutorials and examples are the best way to learn JavaScript and actually see what's happening behind the scenes.


I glad there is a place to get answers to all my JavaScript questions.

IS449 Textbook

The textbook for IS449 is Head First Ajax from O'reilly . Ajax is a way to build internet applications that are more interactive, responsive, and easier to use. This book takes a different approach to explain how Ajax works.


I know there are some people that don't care for the style of this book or just the Head First series, but I really like the way they break down information in a simple way that is to the point. Also, the illustrations and side notes keep it interesting.

Another great thing about this book from O'reilly is that it cost less than other textbooks. There is also the Head First Labs that is a good resource for other books, forums, and blogs to ask questions and get answers.

Blogging Everywhere!

It seems that more and more businesses and school courses require blogging. Blogging is a great place to learn about new topics and to share information.

I took the course IS247 Introduction to Web Application Development a few semesters ago with professor Bud Gibson. That course was also writing intensive and required blogging. We used the learning remix site to post our blogs. It was the first time I had ever blogged and I found it very useful to discuss the topics of the course.















I think that blogging will continue to grow and become a requirement for most school courses and businesses in the future. Not only is it a great place to share information but it is great way to have class discussions and get multiple opinions and feedback.

How to embed a Youtube video into blogger

Embedding a video into blogger is actually quite simple. First, find your desired video on youtube. Mine is located at: www.youtube.com On your youtube page, find the embed box underneath the videos description. Caution: there is a url box above the embed box. Don't copy the url! That will simply make a link to your video and not embed it in your page.

Copy this text and then return to blogger. Create a new post and paste your embed text in the edit html tab on your post. The edit html tab is above the edit window for your post on the right hand side. You can click on compose to return to a 'rich editor' formate.

You should be all set! Here is my example below. This is from my first mountain biking race. Sadly you cannot find me in this video, as the author only tracked their friends in their video. I did make it down that hill though!