Fifth Blog Post (4/24)
As the semester comes to an end, I am also finishing up my final project on student activism. The topic I have been working on is Students for Environmental Concerns, and since Earth Week is one of their main projects, there are a lot of events going on for the past few days. I also saw their booth in SDRP last week while they were collecting people’s clothes for their annual clothing swap. Unfortunately, because of my busy schedule before finals, I couldn’t make it to many of them.
There is still a lot that I need to work on the project, and I still have a lot of writing to do, but I think it is going well. I have learned a few new ways to make my project page look more interactive, such as putting links as buttons. I’m still struggling with linking my index file with the style sheet, but since I have figured out how the style command work, it should take me a little bit more time to have it working. I am looking forward to presenting the complete student activism project and the final version of my homepage. It has been a fun semester working on various interesting projects and I’m glad it wasn’t a class full of traditional essay writing!
Fourth Blog Post (4/2)
I think the biggest differences between writing a traditional paper and building a website is the target audiences and the visual components. Traditional paper is usually used for professional purposes such as research assignment or personal statements for applications. Therefore, most paper is heavily text-based and does not have many graphs or pictures included, except for things like plots from data analysis.
On the other hand, websites usually have many visual components like pictures and videos to interest the audiences. In addition to that, traditional paper only allows people to read, but websites can be interactive. Audiences are able to explore website based on what they would like to learn about more and do not need to read through the whole thing if they are not very interested. Websites can also include audio files and that would be more attracting to people that prefer listening than reading.
Third Blog Post (3/5)
The past few weeks I worked on the clickbait project and phishing scam. This is the first time I actually think about how clickbait works and what characteristics it has. I realized that there are many different types of clickbait, but all have some similar traits that lure people to click on the links. I don't think clickbait is all that bad, there are many clickbait that introduced artists or cute contents that I really enjoyed.
For the phishing scam, I read some of the emails in my spam folder. A few of them seems reasonable, like the ones saying you won a gift card or ask you to fill out a survey. However, I really don't understand the ones that say they want to talk to you and just ask you to reply. I wonder what they can get from it. Maybe these don't count as phishing scams, but I was just curious when I was reading through them. I feel like the phishing scam was kind of like a mini forgery project since we were also creating something to let receivers believe that it is legit and follow what we ask them to do.
Second Blog Post (2/18)
Last week, I put our forgery project on my website. I was impressed by many people's creativity. My project was a forgery of Pottermore article, including a PDF file and two tweets from J.K. Rowling. One of the tweets is actually by J.K. Rowling, and its main purpose is to show that there is something in progress. The second tweet is by me, to present the article.
I picked Pottermore as the topic for my forgery because I am a huge Harry Potter fan and I thought it would be interesting if I can create something that is related to Harry Potter. In addition to that, there are over 14 million people following J.K. Rowling's twitter, so people would be interested if she presents new articles. I decided to make it about something that's not very related to the magical world she created but still compare college students to the students at Hogwarts. It was a fun process working on GIMPS and Google Drawing to create the page format and the tweets.
First Blog Post (1/30)
I never liked coding or programming in the past since I always thought it was difficult and very confusing. However, to my surprise, I have been enjoying working on my homepage in this class so far. In addition to that, making minicomic was a very interesting experience. I have never thought about my own writing process, I always just go with the steps that I am used to. I believe thinking about it and learning other people's methods will be very helpful in the future.
I am really looking forward to the rest of the semester as it seems like we will be working on various fun projects. I hope I can figure out how to make my homepage more creative and make it enjoyable to explore. I listen to podcasts very often so I am very excited about the podcast project we will be doing! Hopefully I will create a website with good contents that interest people while we learn how to write effectively in this modern world throughout the semester.
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