I have been working on my blog for the past few weeks now, and I am learning a lot about how to write with a certain audience in mind. Although I pretty much lack an audience at all on my blog, with only one follower so far, I feel like I am getting a lot out of this blog in terms of how to write for a specific group while also having my own voice.
As I mentioned last week, my final project is a book blog on Tumblr called Keeping It Bookish. I plan to make bookish post consisting of reviews, recommendations, thoughts and ramblings, pictures, etc.
We made it! It is almost the end of the semester, and we are finally embarking on what the entire semester has been leading up to– the final project. I am excited to explore and apply everything we have learn this semester. I have been thinking a lot about what to do for the final project. I considered a hypertext fiction among other ideas but ultimately landed on doing a blog. I am most likely going to do a lifestyle blog or a book blog. These are things that I am interested in and would enjoy writing about, so I figured it would be a good idea.
We made it! It is almost the end of the semester, and we are finally embarking on what the entire semester has been leading up to– the final project. I am excited to explore and apply everything we have learn this semester. I have been thinking a lot about what to do for the final project. I considered a hypertext fiction among other ideas but ultimately landed on doing a blog. I am most likely going to do a lifestyle blog or a book blog. I picked these because they are things that I am interested in and would enjoy writing about.
This week we learned about “aleatory poetry,” which is basically when a story changes every time you refresh the page. It has been interesting to learn over the past few weeks about new forms of storytelling where the reader is an active participant in the happenings of the story. I had never read a story in the form of aleatory poetry before this class, and it was cool to get to read one as well as attempt to make one.
This past week in ENGL 460 we have been learning about Hypertext, something that we have all heard of and use often but have probably never thought about in depth. At least I hadn’t before this lesson. Hypertext is the internet rabbit hole that we have all wondered down at one point in time. Dr. Pilsch explains it perfectly in the weekly reading– “it is the process of going to Wikipedia to find information on a topic, clicking a link to another article and realizing, often an hour or more later, that you have no idea why you are reading an encyclopedia article about pineapples.” As a frequent internet browser who finds themselves in these internet black holes often, I find hypertext extremely valuable to the experience of the internet, and after reading my classmate’s blog posts, I found they produced many constructive points about the topic.
The activity for this week was to play an interactive game on Twine. This activity provided a great illustration of hypertexts and how they work. The game I chose to play was Depression Quest, an interactive (non) fiction about living with depression.
Did you know that Hypertext is a theory? Neither did I before this week’s lesson! Hypertext is a theory that was implemented by HTML (which we’ve learned about in the previous weeks) and was first defined in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson.
This week in ENGL 460 we learned about style and content through CSS. CSS is basically a set of rules that tells your website how you want it to look. This is when you can use your creativity in the coding world. This week’s lesson was probably the hardest lesson we’ve had this semester, but it was also the most rewarding!
Metadata is, simply put, data about data. It gives us a description and context of what the data is. This allows us to better understand the data that is being presented to us. It also helps us find and organize data, which is super helpful.
To be honest, this week’s topic was a bit challenging for me. I understood the reading just fine. I understood the elements of a document, and how markdown and HTML relate to web documents. When I started the “What is Markup?” Activity, I was doing fine until I had to put the navigation menu code into the default.html file. When trying to place the code into the file, I could not figure out where it was supposed to go. On top of that dilemma, every time I put the navigation menu code into the file and went to look at my site, the site repeated. The first half of the page was how my blog looked before (the Cayman theme), and the second half was the primer theme, except it had the navigation bar. I am still perplexed. I have been googling to try to figure out the issue, but alas, maybe I have found a question that google can’t answer. I am still going to continue to try to figure it out, because I really want to learn how.
This week’s reading and activity had me thinking about plain text files. They seem to be the most effective way to express data because they are plain (hence the name) and show data in a basic, easy to understand format. I began to wonder if there are other reasons why plain text is advantageous. I found an article on MacWorld that talks about the benefits of using plain texts I also found he article useful because it is framing the discussion around Mac computers and software, which are my favorite kinds of computers.
Linked below is a page I made about this blog, Yikes, Kam!
After reading “What is Data,” I realized that I had never thought about data before, especially in terms of writing. As someone who is not exactly tech-savvy, I definitely never thought about how data impacts my education in English and my potential career in digital writing.
Sooo, data!
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