I’d like to take the time to write about my experience on our first DS106 assignment. We were asked to create a domain name, and hook it up to a web hosting service. Then once that was all complete we were instructed to sign up for a twitter, youtube and flickr account. Finally to complete the first Assignment we needed to get into our Dashboard and create our first post. Sound simple enough? Well here’s my personal experience on it.

After finally attending our first class with Professor Michael Branson Smith, I left feeling confident about completing this first assignment. He explained everything clearly in class and gave great examples on how to complete this project. Its always been funny to me that everything always looks simple when the instructor shows you. However, when its time for you to actually do it yourself, results always vary.

With nothing but a computer in front of me and silence, it was time to start up on this assignment. Creating my Domain Name was simple enough using godaddy.com. The real fun came while trying to sign up for the hosting site (Cast Iron Coding). The registration was complete, but for some reason my account was reading as “Account Not Activated”. After attempting to sign in few times, and refreshing the page multiple times, I decided to contact the support team. There support team by the way was very helpful. It made me laugh when the person that was helping me asked “How did you hear about us?”, he asked me that question because in order to activate my account he wanted to make sure I was a legit customer. After writing that I was a student and heard of there site through my school, my account was quickly activated.

Once that was all completed, it was time to check if my site was up and running. To my “surprise”, it wasn’t. It did say it would take some time for the domain name to be sent to the hosting site, but I was just really focused on knocking this assignment out the way. With my luck however, that wasn’t the case.

So in the mean time I decided to take the time and create a Twitter Account. That was pretty simple, (Nickds106) by the way. The only part that was and I am still having trouble with is trying to have my gravatar show up on my Twitter. The video that Professor Smith had up was very helpful, but like I mentioned with my luck that wasn’t the case. Creating the Gravatar Account was straightforward. Actually getting my Gravatar to appear on my Twitter and email accounts was a different story. I’M still working on getting that straightened out.

Overall I’m pretty confident about this class, yea there were a few bumps in the road while trying to complete the first assignment, but know one said it would be a breeze. Hopefully everything was done correctly and this post ends up where it is supposed to and my Gravatar will be up and running. Thanks for reading and good luck to the rest of the class.