This cute little guy was spotted outside of the YVR airport during the day. He was so tiny; maybe only ten inches tall. When I looked up owls in the area, I found out that this little fella was a young Short-eared Owl.
According to allaboutbirds.org, you’ll want to look for Short-eared Owls during winter. Look for open fields, grasslands, or airports and visit near dawn or dusk for your best chance of finding them. They may be sitting directly on the ground or flying low and erratically as they hunt.
While I was out driving on this sunny day, I came across some beautiful cherry blossoms that are in full bloom now! From April 1st to April 23rd it’s the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. Lots of events are happening in the city that is themed around the cherry blossoms. Be sure to get out and check out the fleeting blossoms while they are still around.
Make an online reservation before heading out to this beautiful bird sanctuary. It’s a wonderful place to visit if you need to get away from it all and immerse yourself in nature. The trails are easy to walk and you’ll always have the company of a duck or two.
The Sanctuary consists of a mix of 300 hectares of ponds, treed pathways, marshes, and channels. There have been over 300 species of birds recorded there. You are allowed to feed the ducks and chickadees. They also sell the seeds for two dollars a bag at the front counter.
For week 5’s mini assignment, we were asked to summarize our online selves by using an infographic. I searched how to make an infographic and canva came up. Canva is really proving to be one handy tool when creating imagery for my website. I had a lot of fun creating the infographic and chose a gardening tip theme and just remixed it with garden and publication jargon. I called it “7 easy ways to grow a digital identity.” I threw in what I wanted my online self to come across as in Little Feather Adventures. In the infographic, I included my love for the outdoors, adventuring, gardening, animals, and photography. I also wanted my true self to come out within some of my humour as part of my online self.
First impression: At first glance, Bonnie’s website has beautiful artwork of a sunset over a nature scape that is used as her banner, it gives a feeling of warmth and calmness. The title of her website is called “MY LIFESTYLE”, it is in bold, large lettering that stands out and has contrast against the artwork she chose. This makes her main page appealing and accessible to readers. I like the pink tones throughout her page, it compliments the artwork well. I really love the palm tree in the left top corner, you can click on it on any page to get back to the main page. Her menu tabs pop out and are easy to navigate. You get a sense that it is a personal blog about what she finds interesting to write about. Her vibe isn’t to become viral but more of a personal blog to share amongst peers. As mentioned in John Suler’s (2004) article “The Online Disinhibition Effect” Bonnie uses the “We’re Equals (minimizing authority)” technique because her interaction with the reader feels like a peer relationship that is based on mutual experience and story-sharing. I would suggest adding an accessibility plug-in to her website to help those that have certain visual abilities and that could benefit from the variations of text and contrast. The plug-in called One-Click is an example that is easy to add to your website that comes with a variety of settings to help accommodate all readers.
Content: I love the content posts on travel and her ragdoll cat. I like that her contact info is in the contact section and that you can leave her a message in the provided fields. I would remove or change the generic contact info from the bottom of the pages. It would be nice to see more content within her posts along with adding enticing headlines.
Audience: Bonnie mentions in one of her Process Posts that her intended audience is her classmates and friends. I think if she wanted to, she could expand her public further if she used social media links on her website, but that is a personal choice.
It would also be helpful for Bonnie to incorporate SEOs in her posts such as adding keywords to her blog posts, adding videos from YouTube, and including related hyperlinks to her content posts to increase engagement and increase her google search credibility. As Sam Hollingsworth (2021) mentions in “15 Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO,” using SEOs will ensure a good user experience and increase the chances that more people will read Bonnie’s content. Implementing these strategies could help Bonnie grow her public numbers.
Website’s Marketability: I think for marketability Bonnie could have an opportunity to try some monetization techniques. There is the option of adding ads to her site; Google Analytics has AdSense that you can add to your website. Also, using affiliates is another option, like for cat food or cat supplies or promoting hotels or travel, since she likes to write about her beautiful ragdoll cat and the trips she takes with friends, however, she would have to focus on creating a larger public first. Christina Newberry (2022) says “affiliate marketing is a way for content creators to earn commissions by referring customers to brands.” So you can use affiliate codes or links on your content website and every time someone clicks on that link and purchases that item you can make a commission.
Overall Bonnie’s website looks professional, is aesthetically appealing, and is well-designed. With some effort and planned direction, her website has the possibility to become more marketable.
One adventure that always gets me out of the house is a good ole giveaway, what can I say… I’m a sucker for free things!
So when a new neighborhood grocery store has a grand opening event and mails you an invite for a chance to win a $500 gift card, you better wake your butt up at 5:30 am to be one of the first 500 in line!
Save on Foods grand opening on March 23, 2023, and Gift Card Giveaway
For the first 500 people, they were giving away 2 chances at a $500 gift card and another 498 opportunities at a $10 gift card. So, I had pretty good odds at $500. Why not try, at the least, I could get some free milk and butter while I was up.
After waiting in line for an hour and 20 mins, we all filed into the store at 7 am and were greeted by friendly, smiling staff that were handing out the gift cards one by one. The store was pristine, I had never seen a store untouched and displayed so beautifully. They also had a pianist playing music for us.
To find out what you won you had to bring your gift card to the cashier. They also had another coupon if you bought $50 worth of groceries, you get a $10 gift certificate for next time. With all those people coming in all at the same time, the store got pretty crowded quickly. So I got $50 worth of grub and headed to cash.
Here’s my card! Guess how much I won!
Drum rollllllllll…
Ahhh, I won $10. Plus, I also got another $10 gift card for next time! It wasn’t $500, but it was exciting to try. Plus it was great to support a local business on its grand opening.
Go check out Save on Foods in Richmond, B.C. at 9100 Blundell Road at the Garden City Shopping Center. Open every day from 7 am – 10 pm
They are having a door crasher for the first 500 customers on Saturday, March 25th. They’ll be giving away a 3 lbs bag of navel oranges (worth $8.49)! Happy adventuring!
Today marks the first day of spring! Another name for today is Spring Equinox. Spring is hands-down my favourite season. There is nothing like stepping outside, being able to take your coat off again, and seeing the budding blossoms returning.
This past Saturday I found myself exploring Vancouver. I went to the BC Home and Garden Show at BC Place. Even though I don’t own a home, there were some great exhibits and it was fun to dream a bit. One stall was giving away Japanese maple tree seedlings. I was able to buy some pussy willow branches to decorate my apartment.
While down in the area on such a warm and sunny day, I decided to take a walk down on the seaside boardwalk in False Creek. It reached +16 degrees this day. There were so many happy people out just soaking up the sunshine after a long grey winter. What a great walk along this boardwalk it is also a great place to bring your bike or have a picnic by the ocean. It is a beautiful view of the Science Center across False Creek and you can watch the Aquabuses go by. I haven’t ridden one yet, but I plan to this summer. It would be a fun way to get to Granville Island from The Olympic Village (which is about $6.25 one way).
There were so many flowers that were out already! I took so many pictures. I used my phone app called ‘Planto‘. If you are interested in plant names I recommend this handy app. All you have to do is take pictures and upload them into the app and it will identify them for you. I also have mushroom and rock identifier apps I love to use.
During the reading break, I took a trip to Las Vegas. While flying over Nevada I was looking out of the window enjoying the sights of the mountains and desert lands near death valley. In all the flights I’ve taken over the years, I’ve never seen what I was seeing. As we flew above some light clouds I started seeing a rainbow appear, but not any rainbow, this one was circular. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I started to make out the shadow in the center and realized that it was the shadow of our plane in the center of this circular rainbow!
A picture I captured of a glory from the airplane window above the Nevada desert.
According to Paula Ferreira (2022), turns out that this is a rare optical phenomenon that is called a glory. Usually only seen in the right conditions and up high on a mountain or from an airplane. From a mountain, you usually see the observer’s head as the shadow. This phenomenon is caused by the sunlight interacting with water droplets (mist or clouds).
Or more scientifically speaking, glories appear because of wave interference of light internally refracted within small droplets. Much like how you played with prisms in science class in high school, that is how you get certain colours from white light bouncing off the water droplets. In other words, it’s complicated, but if you would like to learn more about them you can read about it here. I hope someday you get to discover one of your own while adventuring. It is quite amazing to witness.
“Purple Stain” imagery was created using DALL-E and the video clip was created using Canva
Purple Stain
Purple stain, purple stain
Purple stain, purple stain
Purple stain, purple stain
I only wanted to see you bathing in the purple stain
Purple Stain was created for educational purposes only. All original song lyrics before this terrible remix was inspired by Prince and his original song Purple Rain.
Upon first glance at the website, it looks visually appealing and exciting. It has plenty of contrast with the black and white styling. You can tell right away that the content will be about Pokemon in some manner with eye-catching Pokemon artwork on the home page. The website design is exciting and draws you in with lots of great pictures and an amazing about-me write-up of the author. I like that it introduces the author on the home page, where you find out about Victor’s passion for collecting cards. The theme choice looks very professional.
Site Structure and Layout
Kaptelinin, mentions “affordances” and explains that a good design is intuitive. This means website visitors should be able to know how to navigate a site using their intuition. I feel Victor’s site has been built using an intuitive design structure, which makes his site easy to navigate, it grabs the user’s attention, creates interest, and allows your eyes to wander to see what will come next. I love that the content of the website is easy to navigate.
Usability and Accessibility
I noticed and appreciated right away that Victor included “One Click” an accessibility plug-in on his website. Homer Gaines mentions that 15% of the world’s population has a disability, which makes it important to consider accessibility in website design to be considerate to others that may experience visual limitations. This add-on enhances usability for Victor’s users. Victor keeps a consistent theme throughout his site and his sentences are easy to read.
Typography
In addition to the usability of websites, choosing a readable and appropriate typeface is important as well (Gertz, 2015). Victor uses a readable typeface that fits his theme. He uses contrast effectively which makes it easy to read and navigate. The bolded white categories and titles on the homepage are appealing against the dark artwork.
Kaptelinin, V. (2014). Affordances. In M. Soegaard and R. F. Dam (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Interaction Design Foundation.
