David’s posts

Homework due 1/28

Posted by David
“homework broke the camel’s back” by Flickr user Emergency Brake
  • Badge. As we talked about in class today, you need to make a badge for yourself. It should be 300 pixels by 150 pixels and it should include some sort of a visual and your name. The optimal thing would be for your badge to be visually striking and to somehow convey a sense of yourself or your interests. If you need a photo editing program, Picmonkey is a free browser-based photo editor that’s easy to use, but feel free to use whatever tool you’d like.

[Update! I meant to add about the badges: I think I said in class that you should email these to me when you finish them? I don’t know why I said that. Don’t email them to me. Make a new blog post add the badge to the post. To be an extra cool student, add a few sentences about the badge–why it looks the way it does, whether you’re happy with it, how you made it, whatever seems worth commenting on to you. Don’t forget to include any attribution details & links if you used someone else’s CC-licensed work!]

  • Theme. Choose and install a new theme for your site besides the default theme. Here’s a document with some helpful guidance on changing themes. As I said, you can expect to find this process to be a little frustrating and you may try a few different themes before you find something that works for you. You can always change the theme again down the road.
  • Survey. Fill out this simple Google form so I have some basic information about you. Once I have your gmail addresses, I’ll share the first set of Google docs with you for the group blogging assignment.

You’ll need to also read Understanding Comics chapter 4 & Maus I chapters 5-6.

The Readers should publish their blog post by Monday evening.

[Note: I’ve added a plug-in that allows me to set some posts as “sticky” (i.e., even though they retain the time and date stamp they were published on, they stay up at the top of the page and new posts come in underneath them).

I’m telling you this just in case you swing by here, see this post at the top and then think there must be nothing new. There are new posts beneath this one. One of them is even an XKCD comic!

I’m also telling you because I want to be transparent about how I manage this site, so if you’re wanting to try to do the same sort of thing, you can figure out how.]

Syndication is working!

Posted by David

I’m now using FeedWordPress to syndicate all of your blog posts. What this means is that when you write a post on your blog, it will automagically get sucked in and reposted here onto this site. That means this page becomes a one-stop shop for y’all to find the posts from your classmates.

A couple of notes, followed by a question. If you are going to comment on one of your classmates’ blogs, when you click on the title link for the post, you’ll be redirected to that students’ post on his or her page, which is where you should leave your comment. I encourage you to read and comment on each others’ posts. (At times, I might require it, even!)

If you are planning to write posts that are unrelated to this class on the domain you’re using for this class, that’s okay, but we’ll want to make arrangements for that. (You’ll need to use a category that designates some posts as needing to syndicate here onto this page, while other posts have different categories and aren’t. Or you can set up a subdomain that is designated for posts for this class.) If this is an issue for you now, or if it becomes an issue for you at any point this semester, just let me know and we’ll work out a solution.

If you look over at the top of the right-hand sidebar, you will see a pull-down menu called “Categories.” All the posts that I write will be categorized as “David’s posts,” so if you choose that line from the pull down list you’ll go to a separate page that lists only posts by me. All the posts pulled in from your sites will be designated with the category “Student posts,” so you can see those separately too.

[FYI, once you start putting up the group blog posts, you’ll categorize them with “readers,” “responders,” or “historians” as appropriate and then those will show up as categories too. Is it okay if I admit that I’m looking forward, at the end of the semester, to pulling up the category page for the historians’ posts and seeing a reverse-chronological narrative describing where we’ve gone as a class all semester?]

So here’s the question: Does this feel too unwieldy for you? If you would prefer it, I can replace the link to this page in the navigation bar up above to links the pages for my posts and your posts separately. To me, that seems unnecessary, but if the blog space feels too crazy and chaotic for you, I can. Scroll down this page, check out your classmates’ posts embedded amongst mine and let me know any feedback you have.

Student sites

Posted by David

I will put together a page with links to all of your sites and link to them from the navigation bar up top soon. In the meantime, here are links to all of the student sites for this course:

Updating some stuff

Posted by David

I’ve updated the Calendar page. As I announced during the last class session, I moved the Understanding Comics reading around just a little bit, but no major changes. (Whenever I make changes to the calendar, I’ll post an update here to let you know to double-check the schedule.)

I will be adding a resources page soon. In the meantime, here are some links to resources that should be helpful for you:

University of Mary Washington is also running a Domain of One’s Own program. All of their students sign up with accounts through essentially the same service as Reclaim Hosting.

  • They have a documentation wiki with lots of good information. If you’re still having trouble with getting WordPress set up, you might pay particular attention to the page on installing WordPress (once you log in to Reclaim Hosting, instead the UMW Domains page that documents shows, from there it’s the same process for us).
  • The page on choosing a theme should be helpful for you as you begin to customize your site.
  • Check out the other help pages on WordPress they’ve published. There’s lots of good information there.