Today’s blog is presented as a page on Codeacademy
Practice makes perfect, right?
And speaking of Codeacademy, when will someone make their badges all open and portable via Mozilla Backpack? I can’t believe there’s a way to put your Foursquare badges in your backpack, but not your Codeacademy badges.
Thanks to some help from Mr. Runeman and other classmates over at P2PU, http://diy.veronicabeaty.com/ is up and running. I’ve even written a little css code to make it look more interesting.
I’m faced with a strangely strong kind of writer’s block though. I want to learn more about how to make it look nice, but I have no idea what sort of content to fill it with. Which is extra silly, since I create web content of one form or another almost daily on social networks. I guess this is the problem with keeping my blog at WordPress. I’m also facing up to a certain about of design elitism — I’m used to using the looks of a website as a little heuristic for the veracity and quality of the content. This leads to me feeling like a simple website such as mine is only fit for conspiracy theories and maybe a homemade candle business.
Ah well, I’m sure I’ll get over this judgmental mindset soon enough. If nothing else, I’ve been meaning to learn how to make candles.
I’ve been stymied in my webcrafting lately. As I discussed in my last post, I registered my domain by upgrading a WordPress.com blog, which I found out means I don’t have FTP access to my domain. That meant I couldn’t in good faith, say I’d completed Challenge 6, since I WordPress had taken care of all that for me. After completing a challenge a day for almost a week, being stuck was frustrating. Learning about web publishing and HTML had been exciting, but I didn’t want to gamble this tidy and understandable blog on my sustained interest in building and maintaining my own website. I talked about this problem with my web-savvy friends, my disinterested friends and various houseplants, and eventually came up with this list of demands:
At first these seemed like an irreconcilable collections of desires, but after many sleepless nights and fruitless Google searches, I came up with a solution.
I had a leg up on today’s set of School of Webcraft challenges, since I’d already chosen and registered a domain name. I did so by upgrading my existing WordPress blog and blindly choosing one of their suggested webhosts. I started a blog as a portfolio, a way for potential professional connections to see a little more about me. As such, it made sense to just register my full name. As the description for Challenge 5.b says “this approach may not be the most exciting method, but it is very versatile and to the point.”
At the time I didn’t really understand the difference between, say, upgrading my blog to a custom domain and registering a domain directly through GoDaddy or the like. If pressed, I might have likened my choice to renting a room that’s already been decorated: someone’s already figured out how to make it nice, and for a small fee I can call it my own. I thought registering through GoDaddy would give me an empty warehouse space, and I’d have to learn how to build walls, and plumb it, and paint and whatnot before I could get on to the important business of inviting people over– i.e. using my website to market myself as a young professional.
I still don’t understand all the implications of using a WordPress upgrade as a means of planting my flag in a chunk of cyberspace. I think I’ve found a small clue in the WordPress Domain Upgrade “Important Notes” section: I don’t have FTP access to your files. Could that be part of the mystery? Can I finish the next set of challenges with only a custom-domain blog, or will I have to do something more complicated? Do I “have a domain name that can be used to further explore DNS?” I’ll answer those questions soon, I’m sure.
For now, all I have to do is understand DNS.
For my fourth School of Webcraft challenge, I looked for HTML-like things in a walk around the block. I came up with the idea for this video quickly, because I felt it conveyed what my thought patterns were like post-HTML-lesson, suddenly seeing things in terms of tags. My bi-weekly dessert quest, transformed!
It’s been a while since I’ve worked with video editing software at all, so I probably spent more time fiddling with that than I did learning the basic HTML tags. This is also the first thing I’ve shot in stop motion, which was easier to do than I expected, but also harder to do well, particularly on a public street where you don’t want to be the creep with a camera. Where’s my Google Glass already?
Under the cut are my explanations for my choice of tags/object pairs and some credits from the video.
Veronica Beaty 