Monday 31 October 2011






With many Rap artists bringing out new albums this year, I decided to create a bar chart so that rap fans could see who is dominating album sales and maintaining their place on the Billboard chart list; and what newcomers are approaching Lil Wayne’s top spot with ‘Tha Carter IV’. 

This chart illustrates the Billboard top fifteen rap albums of 2011, in their current position listed in chronological. It also displays the number of weeks they have coexisted on the chart list, companied by their peak position.   With this bar chart you can compares each albums ranking with the number of weeks they have appeared on the chart to where they ranked at their peak. The bar chart will allow people to view the data very simple and clear. I used blue and red to make the bar chart stand out to appeal to the youth, also it helps to separate both sets of data again making it easier to read and understand.


Source: http://www.billboard.com/#/charts/rap-albums

Tuesday 25 October 2011


View Map Skills in a larger map



Wedding fair is a success
I chose this news article about the Wedding fair as it clearly stated where it took place, which allowed me to mark,the exact location of Preston north end on my map. I think this makes it easier for people to see where the stadium is situated if they are not residents of Preston. I also added the contextual link of additional wedding fair’s taking place, as this would be of interest to anybody who is thinking about getting married. I used an icon of a person kicking a football to represent the football ground.

Taser gang attack man
My Second News story featured a piece about a gang who attacked a man with a Taser gun, as the crime happened in one set location 'the victims home', it was a useful article to put on the map. For the contextual link I decided to put two stories, one is taken from the BBC news website, explaining how the Uk plans to crack down on the importation of Taser ammo.  The second article was taken off the Sun's website, which spoke about David Cameroon going back on his word about how he plans to tackling knife crime in the UK.

Hospital car charges review
The Third article spoke about the hospitals car park charges being reviewed, I chose the
red cross symbol as my marker because that represents hospitals. I chose this
article because again it states the location and of what the news story is reporting on 'Royal 
Preston Hospital'. Although Chorley and Ribble Hospital was mentioned the main bulk of the report
was about Preston. I added a contextual link of additional information about the parking charges/
available spaces, this link also will get updated if or when they make the changes,
which could turn out to be useful information for some.



Public drink purge is hailed a big success
My fourth and final article praised the councillors for the fall of alcohol related crime and disorder in Chorley. I decided to use this article because again it was very clear where the event took place. I believe the icon of the cocktail glass I used was very appropriate for this story.  The Contextual link I inputted was to the Directgov webpage, which features information explaining the links between alcohol and crime.


All four of my stories I picked, were mainly because I could pin point their exact location on my map. Also I wanted stories that I could link with some background information or relevant websites for the articles. In my opinion the map does make the stories stronger because readers can now have a clear vision of where each event took place. However I still prefer to watch or listen to the news than read about it.

Uclan Journalist

Monday 17 October 2011






For the skills test we were asked to take a photograph then resize and crop the picture to three different specifications. I decided to take a photograph of the Preston north end football club. The first specification was 100 wide by 100 high pixel thumbnail, for this size I decided to focus on the Preston north end’s football clubs logo, as the imagine was going to be cropped so small the most effect part of the picture was the logo. The second specification was 400 pixel wide by 300 pixel long. For this size I decided to keep most of the imagine, however, I did crop out the lamppost and the pavement as I felt they didn’t need to be in the picture. In my opinion it made the photography look better without having pointless imagines in shot. The final size was 200 pixels wide by 500 pixels high, I decided to have the logo again as the main focus, but unlike the thumbnail I included the doors and a car, preventing the picture from looking too Blaine.