Why does one write what is in one's thoughts, except for others to read them? In my case, that is my exact purpose. I intend to use this blog as a record of my forays into the world of technology, thanks to my graduate studies in Preparing Instructional Media. As someone who has been traditionally against blogging, facebook and other internet activities which seem to encourage immaturity and disinformation, I'm looking forward to the process of discovery because these same activities can be used to educate and inform. If ever there was a safeplace for democracy, it is in the internet, where widespread censorship is still difficult to enact. So, while this blog remains singular in its purpose to record my work and study processes in LIS 6603, I believe it will also help me track and examine my own technological process.
For my first major assignment, I was instructed to post a webpage to showcase the different instructional media I would create in the course of this semester. I have never posted a webpage in my life, nor have I ever been particularly internet oriented, except for shopping or research purposes. The idea of posting a website was singularly frightening. I had always felt that there were the Internet-Savvy and the Inter-Nots. I was decidedly an Inter-Not and, frankly, quite happy to remain so. Until I started re-typing the code to build a bare-bones website. Something about working with the code itself both made sense and was fun to do. It was like sculpting and I immediately felt that I wanted to work directly with the media and go through a software program designed to keep users away from code. I worked directly in notebook, tinkering and testing until I go a basic idea of how everything was set up. I ended up posted three different pages- there was one modelled off of a template that I simply couldn't get working correctly but in my spare moments, I delete and cut and paste, hoping to figure it out. The end result of all my tinkering is...well...nothing amazing at first glance. But I am immensely proud of it! I had originally posted my website and was happy with it until I noticed that once you viewed the page in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, all of the text ended up shoved to one side and my links were a mess- not good at all. I veiwed the source for the website from both Internet Explorer and Firefox and I immediately spotted the difference- a line of code at the very beginning spoke to Firefox but not to Internet Explorer and through trial and error, I re-worked the page until it functioned as I wanted.
Another challenge was my cute little chipmunk image, which originally was an image of my dog, Sobek, an eerily intellegent but lazy golden retriever chow mix. I had taken a picture of Sobek when he was a pup two years agao and the image was beautiful...and enormous. I tried, with an extreme amount of help from my roommate, to crop the image but to no avail. I couldn't find a way to resize the image AND reduce the size of the file so that it would post on the internet, rather than showing up as a broken image. Finally, I decided to stick with my chipmunk theme and I found an appropriate image- both in size and in the pensive quality of the chipmunk. All in all, I am happy with my little pink chipmunk website! I definitely learned a great deal tooling around. I always feel in my element when I am trying to figure out how things work.
No comments:
Post a Comment