Okay so here we go! I have officially made it through week two of ds106 bootcamp (get excited)!  Here is a quick recap of everything that I did this week….

Forwarding Address-

I was able to set up an email forwarding address with out much problem.  My email address is [email protected] and it forwards to [email protected] 

Class Blogs-

I was pretty sure that I had already listed my class with the class blog last week but I checked back to make sure.  Good news is that I am totally there.

Good old number ten.

Customized Blog-

Customizing my blog was my favorite part of this week.  I spend a ton of time going going through and looking at hundreds of different theme choices.  I ended up deciding to go with the Twenty Eleven theme because I found it to be simple and super easy to customize.  I knew from the beginning I wanted a fun background and that theme really gave me the chance to use whatever picture I wanted.  I searched around the internet for a while before I came across the one I am using now.

I ended up installing all of the recommended plugins for my blog (Akismet, Jetpack, and Awesome Flickr Gallery).  I was especially happy to download Akismet.  I have already had about ten to fifteen spam comments on my site and will be thrilled to eliminate those.  I ended up playing around and rearranging my widgets quite a bit as well.  I went a head and added the calendar to the side of my site and moved a couple of the other items (like meta, categories, and archives) to the bottom.  I felt like this made my site cleaner and easier to use.

After playing around with the customization, and changing everything multiple times, I like my blog much better than I did before.  I feel like it is slowly but surely starting to represent me as a person.  I am excited to keep playing around and finalizing everything.

Welcome Site-

I found it pretty easy to get my Welcome Site up and running. The only part that tripped me up a little was getting wordpress installed for a second time.  I had to play around a bit to figure out how to install wordpress and not just make a clone of my ds106 blog (which I did at one point). The hardest part of making my welcome site was customizing it and figuring out how I wanted it to look.  I ended up deciding to use the same theme (Twenty Eleven) and used a new background and created different menus. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out and am happy with how they flow together.

Daily Creates-

This week we had to pick two Daily Creates to do.

1. For my first daily create I did: Got milk? Another favorite breakfast beverage? Make a picture. Make it art.  This one was fairly easy for me to do.  I am not a huge milk drinker but I absolutely love juice. Here is the picture that I took for my daily create:

P.S. How great is it that I have a Monsters Inc. Cup?

2. For my second daily create I did: Describe the sky in a single sentence without using any color words.  I ended up being inspired by the snow clouds that wehave had here in Virginia over the last few days. Here is my sentence:

.gif-

Making a .gif was by far the hardest and most frustrating thing that I did this week.  You can read a bit more about my issues in my full post about making my first .gif, but to make a long story short the I had some corrupted software that wouldn’t delete or let me install the programs that I need to make my .gif.  After I got everything installed the process was much easier.  I ended up doing a .gif from one of my favorite movies ever, Tangled.

I was pretty pleased with my first attempt  however I realized that I should have downloaded a better quality video. I ended up making a couple more after this one. I was able to make the extra ones with now problem at all.  I was shocked with how easy it was to make a .gif.

This one ended up being my favorite that I made:

Reflection on Second Week-

Overall this week was a lot of fun and really rewarding to me.  Aside from the computer malfunctions, I didn’t find anything that we had to do too terribly difficult.  I had to look at the ds104 handbook a couple times to figure things out, but overall nothing really stumped me.  Bootcamp as a whole was a bit stressful at times, but I think that was largely because of how new everything was.  I am already happy that I decided to take this class and cannot wait to see what we do in the future.

Well that’s all I have for this week.  See ya’ll next week!