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Based on the meme with the same name, I made a terrible extension. Not to be down on myself, it’s just pretty awful. I changed the font of every website to either be in comic sans or in papyrus. It’s random. I also picked five colors, green, red, blue, pink, and purple, for the text to be and that is also random. I struggled with what I wanted to do, mainly because I just wanted to do things that were to big from what we had learned. I changed my mind, made it smaller, made it bigger, struggled for hours on why functions that were perfect weren’t working, I just decided to make something that was just awful. Using the two most hated and joked about fonts and adding in some random colors, I wanted everyone to feel the “ughhhh” as I do when I accidentally remember some embarrassing memory from 7th grade. It also seems like a good prank idea.

Well here it is, the worst thing I’ve made since my sun in the corner of the page with sun glasses days.

At first I couldn’t get the video embedded in the iframe to play, and I had about 30-60 of these errors, which appears to be a bug in the current version of Chrome about secure connections and content loaded after the initial document loads.

link to Github

But then I added more stuff to my iframe and I think a key thing was a different way to autoplay (by adding it to the URL). So it still hits the error dozens of times, but now each error/restart starts the audio playing and creates a total cacophony steve reich-style. I chose the counting crows cover version over the original joni mitchell version because it feels like that one is more of a cliche.

The error code:

Zbp6mgIXa64:1 Error parsing header X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block; report=https://www.google.com/appserve/security-bugs/log/youtube: insecure reporting URL for secure page at character position 22. The default protections will be applied.

#5 link to webstore
#4 link to webstore

I had a pretty thin smattering of likes for my post on instagram (i did not post at an optimum time) but kathleen still used it (thanks kathleen!).

Project 4 Webstore:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/will-you-watch-until-the/hfjogeajmcbcgjcikofalcfcaafbjkc

I was having a bit of trouble with project 5 in getting it to be added to my google chrome extensions. It appears on the webstore, but when I tried to download it it said that there was an error. However, I have all the pieces of it together

This week I was looking at things on the compass 2g website, the website used to consolidate classes, grades, and information for most of the classes at U of I. I had never really paid much attention to this website other than the links to my class pages, but there were a few things I noticed this time. For one, you can customize the page, although the only customization offered is changing the color of the banners (whee). I also saw that there was a tag on the left that said “personal information”. Curious, I clicked on it to see what personal information about me it had.

Apparently you can volunteer information like your name, address, and contact information on here. Although I don’t know why you would want to; as far as I know the only people who can see your compass page are yourself and your teachers. This page just made me think that the people who created compass wanted it to be a bit more of a school social network, having kids connect to each other on here. But as far as I know, it has never been used for that.

This week I’ve been obsessed with the South Park app. Almost every week there is a new event in the PVP mode where they try to draw you in and play against one another more, and you get more cards and money for doing so. This weekend’s event was centered around the idea of being on a team and competing in team battle, which I wasn’t very fond of but found myself enjoying a lot more than any other event I’ve participated in.

I got the first message before the event started, and it says to, “Join an active team, you won’t regret it.” I’d been putting off joining a team because I knew it wouldn’t be with people I knew in real life and I’ve never played an app that had a great multiplayer function anyway, but this app is largely multiplayer where you are fighting against one another to get better. Since I had nothing to lose, I joined “Team Homie” since it was a generic enough name where I didn’t have to really think about it too much. 

You can chat with your team and donate cards requested by your team members after joining a team. Without really thinking about what it did, I would donate cards just to be nice and I ended up in first place for the week for player donations. I’m guessing the week ends on Monday so I still don’t know what that really does, but by donating I was also able to get coins and level up which just makes the whole game experience a lot more fun and easier for you to win.   

When the event started, another news message popped up telling me, “Don’t be a freeloader!” and other encouraging stuff to get me to want to play the event with a team if I hadn’t decided to do so already. When you check the progress of the event, you can see your individual progress or your team progress, which is what I thought was more cool to see. Team progress is also ranked, and I didn’t do as well on this one as I did with just donating cards, but seeing everyone else’s progress made me want to participate more so that it looked like I was helping.

I created an extension called Anonymously Speaking, which replaces author names with “By: Anonymous”. I wanted to see how news intake was affected when the author names were obscured.

I don’t read through news sites myself, so I left it up to Google to tell me what sites to start fishing for. I was targeting the css classes, as I found that most of the author names were coded with pretty particular classes, such as .author, .byline, and other similar names.

Facebook is constantly telling me my Facebook profile is incomplete. I hate it, the need to fill things out is real. They tell me I’ve had my profile for so long, telling me I should update shit. Leave me alone. Now there’s this. “Answer some questions to help friends get to know you” as if my “friends” didn’t know me well enough. It knows that people friend each other on Facebook while not being actual friends but is trying to make it more personal, so people can get to “know me better”, as if they give a shit about me and talking to me again outside of college. I took a picture during this one moment, but it actually went through a few different options, like favorite color or such, all with emojis because being a millennial means I use emojis all the time. I wonder if they give this option by age or if everyone gets this little pop up on their profiles. Is there some crusty Harvard professor answering the question, “A job I’d be terrible at… :P”? Or is it those in a certain age bracket? I’m glad they have this “Not Now” option, but it just means in a week or so, when I look at my profile again, it will bring this option up again. I don’t need to make my profile any more personal than it is. This isn’t MySpace and I’m not in middle school. Leave me be, Facebook.

For my project, I created a Chrome extension that takes every H, T, M, and L that can be (reasonably) pulled from a web page, capitalizes it, and makes it the color green. I chose to emphasize these letters to pay tribute to the HTML behind the web page. I decided to only change the <p>, <h1…6>, <ul>, <li>, and <table> tags; trying to mess with all <div> or <span> tags, even though they might hold text, seriously impacts the performance of your browser.

I tried for a long time to turn every word in a paragraph tag into a hyperlink for that word, but that ended up being pretty complicated. Changing the source HTML without regards to what anomalies are actually underneath will mess with the DOM in unpredictable ways. For example, if someone is using WordPress and has an <img> tag inside their <p> tag….the internet is an unstandardized lawless wasteland. I saved my algorithm for parsing the words from a <p> tag and I’ll probably try it again for a future project. Everything ended up working out because along the way I learned how to use RegExp (regular expressions) for JavaScript which made my current project pretty easy.

It’s a little frustrating that I wrote so many lines of code to only end up with a 4-line function for my finished project, but it just be like that sometimes.

Check out the project on the Chrome Web Store here: link

For my observe this week, I decided to comment on how SEO and PPC ads show up on my google browser. I typed swimsuit into the search engine and on my SERP there were immediately 4 paid advertisements as well as the shopping feature on the right hand side. The organic search options were obviously below the paid ads but in response to this SERP set up, I watched how I reacted. I actually realize that I generally don’t click on the paid ads because for some reason I feel like if a company is paying for their ads to be at the top of the page then maybe they aren’t as popular or even as reliable as the company’s who have effective SEO techniques (which are often free). Although I’m an advertising major, for some reason the idea of giving into ads irk me.

It was during the first few days of protest that I joked the best way to get my complacent peers to picket was to convince them it would create great numbers on their fit bit. Multitasking at its finest right? It wasn’t until the 4th day of strike that I realized I my own phone was roughly tracking my steps when it was on my body. 

At first I felt a terrible pride in the numbers. They were my numerical evidence of my labor. I had not sought these numbers out but here they were! ready for me to enjoy and bask in. But I did feel gross. I felt myself reducing my work to the numbers and felt I was playing the capital production game of which i’m always trying to work away from. I was enjoying it.

Furthermore: I had never used this app before. I had no idea that it was enabled. when I first turned it on I did not give it access to my location: but it is still tracking movement of some kind even though it is not a GPS related tracking system. Is this data safe within this app? is it just on my phone or is it in a cloud of data without my knowledge. I was further disturbed by this when I realized that I don’t know what half the apps on my phone do. I am currently in the process of evaluating what is useful and what I feel violates my consent bc I had no knowledge of it’s functioning.

This week I noticed that Spotify has started adding animated album cover artwork to play during select songs. I knew that “Sign” by VHS Collection utilized this, but I realized this week that another song — “List of Demands” by The Kills — was doing it as well. This doesn’t seem to be a default setting for a song, and it appears that the artist has to choose to create and upload it. It also doesn’t necessary apply to the whole album; for The Kills’ artwork, the animation didn’t appear for any other song on that album (the VHS song was just a single so I couldn’t tell with that one). You can tell if a song has animated artwork by seeing the green circled icon on the “Now Playing” bar on the bottom of the Spotify app (see below on the left). When you pull up the “Playing From” screen after clicking on the bottom bar, the screen changes from the typical album display (see below on the right) to the full-screen animation (see above on the left). If you click on the animation it shows the song information with the animation dimmed and playing behind it (see above on the right), but this only stays active for a few seconds before reverting back to the animation. It clearly puts the animation front and center for the user.

I would love to see more of these types of animations from Spotify. I think it’s a really unique, eye-catching way of displaying music. It makes me feel more engaged and interested in the song that is playing. I don’t usually leave my phone on display when listening to music but I would probably start doing it if it meant seeing album art like this in a cool new way. I’m surprised more artists don’t do this for their music or why they don’t do it for the whole album. It seems like a very innovative way to incorporate music with the technology behind the streaming service.

Also, I like how much Spotify encourages you to share your screenshots with your friends. I got the blue notification every time I took a screenshot for this post.

So my plan for my script is to add and replace the rating system on MAL to be more similar to IMDb’s when it comes to rating shows.  Personally, I think being able to rate shows both with decimal point and also by each episode is better than being left with only a 10 point scale and having to rate the entire show as a whole.  I think rating by episode gives those interested in looking into the show an idea of the range of enjoyment episode by episode and for those rewatching helps them sparse through the best episodes easily.

So recently I have gotten into playing Pokemon Showdown with friends online.  What makes this game fun is the ease as to how you can competitively battle, in actual Pokemon games you would have to spend a lot of time catching and training Pokemon, On Showdown it is essentially a database of all the Pokemon available and you are able to make any sort of team you wish to create.  The feature I also enjoy is the random battle as well as that is instant gratification since you don’t even need to spend the time to make a team.  Over time you collect and lose points depending on if you win or lose and since there are numerous players online it is unlikely you’d be stuck in limbo during a battle unless the other player is planning to forfeit.