OK. I am reconsidering BT ADSL and just forking out the extra £120 and getting it from Demon so I can get the IP address.Today I also bought two more books to aid my major project : Design For Community, the art of connecting people in virtual places, by Derek M. Powazek ISBN:0735710759. and I bought : Web Redesign, workflow that works by Kelly Gotto & Emily Cotler, ISBN:0735710627.I am running out of time and money now.

I ordered ADSL from BT in the end because the setup fee from demon is still £150. I cant afford that.so I don't get my IP address. oh well.

I forgot to mention that I cancelled my ADSL order with BT as they have dropped their prices nad others should follow suit. I am going to wait for Demon to drop their prices(18 march) to £28.99 a month, Bt are offering it for £29.99 a month but they dont give me a static IP address like Demon do. so I will have to put up and wait. I've also updated the links on the left, be sure to check them out as they are really good resources and inspirations.

today I bought the following books: Community building on the web,secret strategies for successful online communities ISBN:0201874849 by Amy jo Kim and I also bought: Content Critical, gaining competetive advantage through high-quality web content ISBN 027365604X by Gerry McGovern and Rob Norton.Hopefully to get some good advise and some good references. I also visited a few sites and downloaded some white papers in pdf format to use as reference material aswell and see what their approches towards online communites is.

just to let you know, some of my friends(Sumit Rai and Amir Hashmi) who are also advising me on my major project(Sumit Rai and Amir Hashmi)are on the apple.com website. Amir is the guy who virtually built the whole thing himself. visit the site here

sorry I forgot to mention an exhibition at the design museum about interactivity, I'll post the full details here as soon as I find out more.From what I have gathered I do know that Joshua Davis( Praystation.com, Dreamless.org) is displaying his work there as well as Daniel Brown(noodlebox), both are very talented and I draw inspiration from them. Visit if you get a chance to.

I have interviewed Chris Linford (course director) today regarding his last email to me. I asked him to guide me into the direction of any resources that could help me understand HCI more and help me to develop an interface for my project. He mentioned that although my site is targeted towards digital media students and they should understand how to navigate through a website, they would probably like different types of interfaces and colour schemes. Some may like icons , and some not. some may like minimal design but others may like to have as much information displayed as possible and so on. To tackle this I am going to put together a few more designs and see if they appeal to people. Then take the best aspects of each and try to work towards a site that pleases visually and functionally. I also discussed the technologies I plan to use, just for the sake of this diary here are my final choices:FLASH 5.0( navigation, forum and chat) HTML 4.1(Page layout), JAVASCRIPT 1.2(browser manipulation), CSS 2.0(display/HTML manipulation), PHP 4.1.1(talk to Flash and create XML and HTML documents), mySQL 4.23.47(database), XML 1.0( data transfer between FLASH and PHP), Apache Server(included on Mac OSX).The reason for these is the fat that all except Flash are free technologies(open source, or free to use) and can be written in BBedit 6.5( high end script editor for macintosh), there is alot of documentation and support on the web.

I have installed PHPnuke which is a CMS system written in PHP that you install onto your webserver and configure to work the way you want it to an dyou can create a layout all of your own via CSS and Javascript, the other good thing about it is that it is freeware, one of the big perks about the open source community.I am an ardent fan of open source and plan to distribute my major project code in this manner. In respect to my last post about HCI rules I have come across a site called Flash 99%good which is in response to Jakob Nielsons article "Flash 99% bad". The site tries to advise on good design aspects of a flash site. Some points are valid and it is a good attempt at tackling the issue but I found the site to have flaws of its own(mainly the navigation menu, a bit flimsy for me). Macromedia have some very handy tips on there site which I have found to be more useful. I am also glad to say that my MAC is now runing very nicely, mySQL and PHP work fine on it and I have not encountered any major problems so far.

I've been searchng for this book:Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful OnlineCommunities 
Peachpit Press; ISBN: 0201874849 by Amy Jo Kim and books by Jenny Preece both are women who have a great deal of knowledge on online communities and HCI. They should help me in my 7000 word writeup and my actual artifact.