And so ends the second week of DS106 and bootcamp! 

I feel pretty accomplished right now.

Onto this week’s tasks

This week wasn’t as taxing as last week.

My first task was to customize both this blog and the main welcome site. Luckily, I had already started on this blog! This theme that you see here is called Something Fishy and it was created by Caroline Moore. Normally, I am the first one to start messing with the CSS of a site, but there is very little about this theme that I don’t like. That’s why I haven’t really changed anything.

I feel like this theme is playful, colorful, and creative. I just adore the little fish hook that comes down when you scroll, as well!

I’m more of a fan of simple blogs without widgets or sidebars, but for the purposes of my DS106 course, this layout works well. I want people to easily find categories and the tag cloud (which is currently at the bottom of the page for now). I added a couple of plugins this week, Akismet and JetPack. I really want to get more into some of the other plugins, though. I’ve used a number of them on other blogs, but I just haven’t had the time this week to find out which ones and install them. I’ll definitely get to that in the coming days, though, as I figure out what I want to do with this blog and my welcome site.

I figured out the font to the header, as well, since I’m a fan of making my own headers. The font is called Pacifico and you can find it here at dafont.com. I’ve been using dafont since eighth grade, so it wasn’t hard to locate this one!

FYI: If you ever are curious about what font or program I used or how I did something you see on here, feel free to email me at: [email protected]

Customizing my welcome site

My main site is a different story, however. Even while writing this I’m playing with the colors and how it’s set up, because I don’t have the time to change the stylesheet with all the other work I have to do for my college courses.

So the theme for heymsparker.org is iRibbon by CyberChimps. I wanted it to be quite different from my DS106 blog and more classroom-oriented.

When I first got it, it looked like this (this is the preview since I forgot to take a picture!)

While a gorgeous theme, I’m rather bored. I think they did a wonderful job on highlighting the slider and the posts with a different color, but that orange makes me want to throw up. So I changed the colors around, changed the background to a ribbon I made, and created a new header with the name of my site.

This is what it looked like after a few modifications:

Oh yea, I did change the slider images, too, because, again, that orange.

Now, though, the pink stripes are too much. So here’s what I did to create the final(ish) site:

1. I created a neutral stripe to compliment the content.
2. I created a new school/teacher-themed header in Photoshop.
3. I used the same background/edges from my header to create better slider images.
4. I changed the color palette (which you can do in iRibbon’s customizing options) to a green/red theme.
5. I changed the color of the ribbon that heads posts.

As thankful as I am for the developers of this theme, they made it incredibly hard to use custom CSS with these ribbons.

So currently, I’m working on how to change the color without changing the 3D effect of it.

I’m not entirely happy with it yet, but I am sure I will play around with it in the weeks to come.

Finally, I made the DS106 slider image (not shown) and the DS106 link redirect to this blog using a plugin called Quick Page/Post Redirect. I’ve used this plugin to redirect since my first blog at UMW. There may be built-in ways to do this, but it’s so simple with this plugin that I am pretty happy with just using this method.

Other tasks this week

Daily Creates

I also did a few Daily Creates this week. I didn’t get as many as I thought I would, but I’m not a creative writing person, so those are always hard for me. I’ve been trained to write like a history major, and it’s been hard to break that.

For Monday’s Daily Create, the assignment was to take a photo of the one thing you must see, do, eat, hear, etc. everyday.

This was easy for me. I obsessively keep three calendars/schedules. With such a crazy amount of things to do my last semester of senior year, I can’t slip up!

For Tuesday’s Daily Create, we had to submit a favorite monologue from a movie with every third word removed. While some people used “____” to show which words were missing, I decided not to do that. I think the message of the monologue changed and was more interesting with all those words removed, too. You can read the “new” monologue here.

For more on my daily creates this week, you can check out this post.

Make your own GIF!

I made a lot of gifs this week, but I’m only going to include one here. There’s more, though! If you want to see the rest of them, you can go to this post I did earlier this week.

The gif I’m including here from the assignment is the one from Watchmen:

This scene is just so beautiful during the movie, that I thought it fit well into our assignment this week which was to create a gif from a favorite movie which has minimal movement but also captures the essence of a scene.

To learn more about how I made it and what programs I used, the post is right here.

A couple thoughts

As work starts to pile up in other classes, I thought it would be hard to keep up with DS106. I’ve found, though, that it’s the opposite. I often find myself preferring to work on DS106 assignments and messing with my two sites instead of reading or researching for my courses. Did I spend all day today messing with my site some more when I could have been writing one of the three papers I have due this week? Yes.

Overall, I think these two weeks of bootcamp were not as hard as I thought they would be. Hopefully, I can keep this up because I feel like this class is helping me stretch my creative abilities. In the past few years, I’ve only gotten to use my creativity when polishing lesson plans or creating tiny project blogs. I really enjoy the creative process and can’t wait to see what I can do by the end of this course.

But for now, I think all the DS106ers should celebrate because we got through the storm of creating new sites, blogs, and setting everything up.