China Net Critique

Last week and final week of presentations have come and gone. Before getting into my review of Trevor’s presentation/website, I have to say this week we saw more really interesting projects that are much closer to being done which was neat and gave some last minute inspirations.

On to the review. First off I have to say I was really impressed to hear that Trevor had decided to undertake coding his own website. I know he has some of these skills from before but I know it still isn’t an easy task given other responsibilities and course assignments. Overall the site looks really good and I can’t really nitpick anything in terms of deign or layout other than maybe the dark colour scheme but even then it still looks very professional. I do have to say that the dynamic moving visuals are really neat and make the site seem that much more professional and impressive when compared to other simple text based websites one find when doing on-line research.

As to the content, I was really impressed with the large number of links and resourses provided to viewers interested in the Chinese language. Honestly I think this is where the site and overall purpose of the site really shines. It is awesome to have a resource that helps bridge the viewer with another body of work in another language. I recently completely a project on Chile for another class and would have loved a site like this to help me navigate Spanish sources and point me in the right direction when looking for non-English sources.

Trevor mentioned the unfortunate lack of Chinese characters and although I don’t understand Chinese I do understand that some concepts can only be explained in a native language. Because of this need I would really like to see Trevor find a solution to this problem but given the time constraints and the limited number of options I would understand if one isn’t found in time for submission.

The presentation was nice and short. Despite its interesting nature it was a good call to not dwell on the technobabble that many hear when explaining coding. Additionally, I like how with this presentation Trevor brought forward an additional tool not talked about in class. This program was Sublime Text which is pretty much an enhanced version of Notebook that colours and formats text to help with coding. This tool seems really neat, and notwithstanding the insane price tag, would be a really good tool for those who want to code. I can’t tell you how much a program like this would help; the colouring alone helps with the organization and reading of code and would definitely help with debugging for novice programmers.

All in all, Trevor’s presentation was really good. He presented a nice looking site with real purpose and utility and even was able to share new tools with the class which is always a bonus.