Another week done!

This week was all about making my blog a little bit more official. Luckily I had started this last week because I had gotten all sorts of hyped about the class. Essentially the idea was to customize my blog to make it reflect me as an individual, or at least in  my eyes, that is what I wanted it to do. Also, I wanted it to reflect the class as well and my goals for the class as well as maintain a professional atmosphere since I have worked on blogs and websites before.

Now, I chose the name “Wise Fish Good Porpoise” for my blog with the tag line “We’re all mad here, but no wise fish goes anywhere without a good porpoise.” I am a big fan of Alice in Wonderland. I’ve been reading it once a year since I was seven, making it a total of 18 times read over the course of my life (twice this year…hehe). I thought it would be interesting for this class, a class where I am blending my literature and writing skills as well as my love for technology to customize my blog around the idea of whimsy and intricacies. Most people don’t know that Wonderland was designed quite delicately. Carroll was actually the esteemed Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, who catered Wonderland, yes for the Liddell children, but also wrote in arguments against the logic of imaginary numbers being introduced to the mathematical world in Victorian England. Dodgson was actually a straight-laced scholar and wanted nothing to do with this “new wave” math. So he made fun of it with shrinking bodies and perpetuating time. Nevertheless, what I am trying to say is nothing is as it seems. An English major can love computers, just as much as a mathematician can seem the silliest man to have ever existed.

I thus ventured to customize my blog in a retrograde, computer screen design. I wanted to reflect the idea of screening my site from a meta perspective; also, I felt it was pretty hipster and that made me smile haha. I included widgets for following and I also had to do some html manipulation for adding the home page links and cloud blocks, as well as a few other gadgets.

My plan now is to work on my menu. I succeeded in getting the image page to create a gallery of all my images, but I need to get the video page to link to all my videos and am finding some sort of block with the html coding on my theme. For instance, whenever I upload any video from YouTube, it must be manually embedded into the html code and not uploaded using the nice-and-easy WordPress uploader. My goal is to have this done by the end of next week. I might use the gallery option we used on my Lit Journal, which was a widget and featured a collapsible option.

The other continuous thing I did this week, of course, was continue to contribute to Daily Creates. I added three to the repertoire this week and posted a summary here.

The first was for Monday and it was to post a picture of the Outdoors. I uploaded a photo from when I travelled abroad to England and we hiked to the top of Glastonbury Tor.

The next Daily Create I participated in was on Tuesday. It was to upload a video of someone being legitimately confused; so I decided to share the video of me post-concussion that I sent to my best friend earlier this year.

Finally, I liked the daily create of featuring a spinning object. However, instead of featuring just one object, I shared a photo from an artist I follow on Flickr who spun the entire camera frame and I thought it made a really fantastic shot.

In using Flickr, we were require to reflect upon the use of Creative Commons. Here is my post about it. Essentially CC works as a collaborative effort between artists (or non-artists if you’re like me) who share their work on some social media site, and agree to allow others to certain legal rights of sharing. These rights can be expanded to all: attribution, derivatives, commercial, or to any varying degrees. The beauty is really creating a legal sharing space for work instead of setting up the web for illegal stealing of other people’s work. I have been using Flickr’s CC search since last semester and find it an amazing resource. I think it is a brilliant way to make sure the web becomes a more collaborative effort rather than an individual one.

I was really excited that this week we had a Visual Assignment to do. It required creating, for me, my first GIF. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be to create my first gif. First, I had to download a couple of programs.

The first being MPEG Streamline. This program allowed me to cut and thread the clip I had on my computer of Bridesmaids (digital copy for the win!).  Once I had done this, I then exported the video file as images to my computer. This allowed me to upload the images into a program called Gimp as layers. In this program I cropped and maximized the animation for GIFs and then voila: my first GIF in tribute to my favorite funny lady, Kristen Wiig in my favorite movie of her’s, Bridesmaids.

Kristen Wiig is Ready to Party with the Best of them…and so am I

Overall, I think this week went really well. I am still really enjoying this class and what it requires me to do each week. I still find myself frustrated because I have a lot of big ideas of what I want to do and find myself limited by my own ignorance, but hopefully that will be changed over the course of the semester.