Final Social Media Smackdown (yeeeeeeeeeet)

Final Smackdown. Wow this is the saddest day of my life. But we'll push through this, I'll push through this pain and grind this out.

Aight, let's go. We'll talk about the thing that actually drives me close to insanity for 17th straight weeks every year, ESPN Fantasy Football. This is probably a bit of a stretch calling it social media but it probably still constitutes as it because it has a good amount of social features.

To start off, what is fantasy football? Fantasy football is a game played with a group of people drafting a team of NFL players and winning head to head matchups against other friends based on scores of the weekly NFL games. (Although this is not exclusive to football, there are versions for most major sports.)

ESPN Fantasy Football isn't just a game but has a good amount of social elements to it. On ESPN, you can send messages to your weekly opponent, send messages to your entire league on message boards, etc.

ESPN also adds another element with the professional sports writers they have on staff. Fantasy football analysts will write articles and they will be displayed directly onto the website or mobile app and fantasy football players can chat with each other, and possibly the analysts themselves, about whatever topic was talked about.

TECH BLOG #6: REVENGE OF THE TECH

Tech, Let's talk tech. I love it, you love it, so let's bang out one more tech blog. You feel? Aight, cool. Let's do this.

Let's talk about a big one Word Press. As a graphic designer, web site design unfortunately is a large part of the market. Word Press makes the daunting challenge of designing a website just that much easier.

Word Press is an open source website developing tool. It allows the user to create a website for free by using pre-made layout, widgets and countless other things. But unlike all of the drag and drop web site developing products nowadays, Word Press can make amazing things with a HTML savvy individual. In Word Press, you are not limited to what they've given you, it has the ability to directly change the HTML coding of the website and then the possibilities are only limited by your imagination and skill.

I like Word Press because it can make you a professional and function website quick for free.

And as they say, "If it's free, it's for me."

Tech Blog #5

I LOVE TECH BLOGS SO MUCH.

I'm going to talk about one of my favorite tools that I've used for at least a decade now, EasyBib.
Easy Bib is a website that helps students with their Works Cited.
What Easy Bib is is an online tool that can create a perfect Works Cited for a student's paper for free.
It an create MLA, APA, Chicago and many more. It can cite books, newspapers, journals and websites. It is free and easy to use.

Easy Bib is dope. It has saved my life every single time that I've had to do any kind of research paper. After you're already clinically depressed from typing a 10 page paper, you don't feel like typing up a confusing Works Cited but at the penalty of your work being plagiarism, you do it. With Easy Bib, though, it's just done. Boom. You give them the name of a book, they'll know the info about it. Give them a URL of your article, they'll find all of the info that the website gives you. Easy Bib is love. Easy Bib is life.

Tech Blog 4

Let's chit chat about Dropbox. I don't think anyone has talked about that yet and completely out of ideas.

But anyway, Dropbox is an amazing asset that teachers and students can take advantage of. Dropbox is a free It can allow for one way sharing or two way sharing. In most cases, this is used by a teacher who will provide his or her students with a link and they can easily upload their assignment to them.
It can also be used in another way that allows a group of people to all upload assignments but also be able to see and download everything else uploaded. This could be very beneficial to those doing group assignments.
This is one service that was been a huge help to me during school. Doing graphic design, I sometimes have huge files to send. Most of the time, these files are way too large to send by email and even sometimes too big to upload to Blackboard. That's we're Dropbox comes in. If the teacher has a Dropbox set up, a massive file could be quickly and securely sent to them.

Good Website Smackdown

Good Website SMACKDOWN

For my smackdown on a good website, I'd like to talk about Draft Kings. If you watch any kind of sports, you've seen commercials for this at an obnoxious rate, but what is it? Draft Kings is a fantasy sports based gambling website. Just like in fantasy football/baseball/etc., you pick a team and just pray they do good.

But onto their website, it's fantastic. As soon as you create an account with them, you're greeted with one of the cleanest home pages you can ever hope to use. Everything you need to read with contrasted well for eligibility. Navigation is intuitive to anyone that has used any sort of modern website. The site flows downward with the weight of importance; the very top is account navigation, then follows sports navigation and that's followed by contest navigation. The website loads fast, so the designers have clearly put time into compressing all of their files. Draft Kings is clearly made by an experienced team of designers and programmers.

Tech blog 3

I love Tech Blogs so much.

Do these have to relate back to our academic or professional career? Because I'm really out of idea. Everything a graphic designer uses is in the Adobe Suite.

I'll just start talking about technology that is a part of my normal life. Something that is a very useful in my daily life is a website called sleepyti.me. Sleepytime is just a simple time calculator that helps you get a more full night's sleep.

Sleepy Time is a calculator that tries to time out your sleep cycle for you. Sleep cycles last for 90 minutes and it makes you feel much better if you wake up after one instead of in the middle of one.

Sleepy Time offers you two options to help you; "I need to wake up at ___" and "If I go to bed now, I should wake up at ____". 

Sleepy Time is completely free to use and works right from your internet browser. It's a fantastic website for anyone that regularly sleeps daily or even those new to sleeping that just use it as a hobby. 

App Smackdown 2 - Spotify

APP SMACKDOWN

For this Smackdown, I would like to talk about Spotify. It, somewhat, indirectly effects me in a professional sense but is an overwhelming part of my life in a personal sense.
Spotify is a music streaming service that launched in 2008 in Sweden. The service currently has over 75 million users and currently brings in over 1.3 billions dollars a year.

Spotify is a service available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and more. It allows the user to bring an unlimited amount of music with them wherever they are. Users can choose from artists, albums, genres, community playlists and much, much more. Members with a premium membership have even more features available to them. They can listen to music which no ad interruptions, they have the ability to save any album on playlist onto their phone for when an internet access is not available and they also have the ability to seamlessly switch their currently playing music to any other of their connected devices.

Spotify doesn't have much of a direct effect on my graphic design study or work, but it does help. As a Graphic designer, I have to sit in front of a computer for hours on end. Spotify eases the burden of time consuming tasks. It's a real moral booster. I'm even using it right now.