Week 8: Final Summary

When looking back to my first blog post I feel that I have a much greater understanding of how important the role of technology is in any type of business, but especially a website like mine. Each week I was easily able to relate the topics we discussed in class to the ideas of my website. Some examples that I found very useful for my company was understanding the functionality of excel, understanding computer hardware, and especially understanding networking. I found the different functions of excel to be extremely useful for managing all of my customers data such as contact information, credit card info, billing addresses, etc. To manage all of this data I would use the pivot table function to efficiently organize this important information for my website. After learning about computer hardware I had a much better understanding of how to manage my budget when buying computers for my businesses office. Depending on the needs of my co-workers I am now able to identify how what certain components would be necessary and not necessary to make what ever they are doing run smoothly.  Lastly I found the knowledge I gained about networking and the internet to be extremely helpful in my understanding of how my website actually functions on the internet. While maintaining my website I am bound to run into some connectivity problems. I now have some knowledge in networking that could help me identify some of these connectivity and would allow me to pin-point the issue.

While composing each of these blog posts it made me realize that each of these technological topics we discussed are all different job positions that I would need employees for to actually successfully run and maintain my company and website. Although I might be able to start this website up on my own, if it ever did grow and became popular it would be impossible to manage all by myself. It is interesting to note that when a website grows and becomes popular, the technology behind it also grows, and can become out of control if not efficiently managed.

Over all I really enjoyed this project. For me this experience has been a brand new way to actually learn information in a class. I could see this blog possibly being very useful for both review in this course and also review for my future IST courses if I decide to continue blogging and further developing my idea through the topics we discus in class. Also blogging about this idea has really made me realize how developing entrepreneurship ideas takes much time because there are so many different aspects that go into actually making these ideas into realities. What this project has taught me about my idea, and websites in general, is that there is a large amount of different technologies that you must first have a solid foundation and understanding of before attempting to create and mainstream a website. What is great that from this project I think it has set me off with a great foundation and understanding of the basics behind these technologies.

Here are the blogs that I commented on:
http://bit.ly/vKoXZ7
http://bit.ly/tntfzu
http://bit.ly/vrTig0

Week 7: Networking

This week in class we talked about how the internet works. Data is transfered over the internet from what is called network packets. Network packets are basically just envelopes of information data that have a source and a destination. Each of these data packets are numbered so it can organize correctly and display what you are trying to see over the internet. We then learned about internet protocols which are communication rules that these packets follow. For example the most common internet protocol is HTTP, or hyper text transfer protocol. What this protocol does is it first makes a connection to the server, then it requests a file, the server in response sends the file, and then lastly the web server closes the connection.The last part of this protocol is what is important when running a web server. If the server did not close off the connection to its users then the server would be overflowed with users and most likely freeze or crash.

The next important protocols we learned in class were the transmission control protocol and the internet protocol (TCP/IP). TCP is the protocol which controls the data flow between one network device to another and the IP address is what defines the route that data packets take to arrive to different devices on a network. As I further explored the components of a network I learned about the default gateway, which is basically a network router. This network router is what forwards network communications from one network to another. Also I learned about the DNS and DHCP servers. The DHCP server is a network protocol that helps configure a computer with its own leased IP address, as well as the IP adress for the default gateway. the DNS server is a service which sorts out and maps names to the network IP addresses and IP addresses to names.


Since my idea is a website, networking becomes a major part of my job of running this website. A good understanding of the internet and networking is necessary to have a successful website. Some things specifically that I would have to make sure of is that I buy the right amount of web servers to support the amount of incoming and outgoing connections to my website. Also if users ever have trouble connecting to my website I need to know how to fix these problems by identifying where exactly the problem of connecting is occurring. 

Week 6: Professional Blog Review

Since my idea is related to gaming and connecting the gaming community, I decided to look at the professional blog joystiq.com. Joystiq.com provides the video gaming community with gaming news and commentary, the latest gaming videos, screenshots, reviews and previews. After looking through this blogs content I can tell that they are really on their game of knowing when new video games are going to be released. You can tell that they are professionals because of the type of content that they describe in their blog posts. For example, their latest post on the blog is that "Assassin's Creed's Ezio Auditore de Firenze will be a playable character in the Soul Calibur 5, due out in March of next year". They clearly seem to have the inside scoop on most of their stories. Also another thing to note is that there are multiple bloggers for this one website. There are 14 different editors for this blog so that means that there is a constant flow of content posted throughout the day.


On joystiq.com there are a number of different tabs to go under so you can read information that is relevant to you. For example, since the only gaming consoles I currently own are the PC and the PS3 I would only want to read content for either of these consoles. I can then click either the PC gaming or PS3 gaming tab and it will direct me to games, reviews, videos, and screenshots of video games for these systems. Also another thing I realized was that in each of these posts before describing the content the editors would first start their blog posts with either pictures, screenshots, or video gameplay of the video game. I guess what this is trying to do is to hook the readers eyes on the images of the video game before writing so it gets the reader interested in what they will be discussing. Inside their discussion the editors always use links to either the video games website, screenshots, or more videos. 

Week 5: Photoshop Lab

This week in lab we got to experiment with the website Photoshop.com. Photoshop.com is a free version of adobes photoshop but is completely web-based. I was honestly surprised with the quality of the image editor and will definitely be using it again in the future. For our assignment we had to take an image and basically clean it up with photoshop.com. The site was easy to use and I was surprised with the amount of effects you could apply on the picture to clean it up.

This lab gave me somewhat of an introduction to the world of digital photo editing and design. It made me realize that when designing my own website I would most likely need professional help to actually do it correctly. I could see them using programs like photoshop to edit the websites image. I also realize now that to have a successful website it must be clean and easy to use, much like adobe's photoshop.com.

Week 4: Input/Output

This week in class we learned about input and output devices. One input device that I found to be interesting is  Radio Frequency Identification or "RFID". RFID is a simple system that transmits the identity of an object or person wirelessly using radio waves. RFID is a microchip that can be as small as a half a millimeter and can be mounted on materials such as plastic, cotton, or paper. We learned that there are two types of RFID chips, Active and Passive tags. The main difference here is that active tags mean that they are battery powered and passive tags mean that there is no battery needed. Since the active tags are battery powered this allows them to have an improved operating range. These can be used in cars as speed passes because the range from the receiver can be greater than 100 meters and can be read at speeds up to 100 MPH. The more commonly used passive tags have ranges less than 3 meters but are much more cheaper then the active tags due to the lack of battery.

For my company these tags could be extremely useful for sorting out deliveries. RFID tags are much more efficient and accurate than using bar codes on my packages. When packages full of video games come in these RFID tags would enable me to do a mass scan with just one RFID reader. The tags would include shipping information so my company would then be able to easily sort out each box and deliver them accordingly. I'm guessing that my company would at some point have massive amounts of deliveries to sort through at some point and if we were still using barcodes it would take a very long time to sort through each box because you would have to scan one at a time. This would greatly delay my shipping time and probably make me lose customers due to slow delivery time. RFID tags greatly decrease this time it takes to scan and makes the shipping process that much faster, keeping my customers happy with my service.