Welcome to my Website!
This website was created for my English class at Santa Clara University. The site consists of four pages, a Cultural Hypertext, a Tactical Hypertext and Analytical Hypertext. The Cultural Hypertext page discusses the development and importance of Internet Cultures. I discuss an iPhone application called Spitfire Athlete and how Internet Cultures have changed the interaction we have with fitness. The Tactical Hypertext explains the Emergency Blue Phone Systems installed on college campuses that promote a call to action for safety. Finally my Analytical Hypertext is a short story written as a remix to the novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
At the end of the course, we asked to reflect on our experience in creating a website and writing to an audience.
Over the course of this quarter, I feel that I have learned a great deal about technology and its use for literature. I was asked to do things I never thought I was capable of doing, such as building a website from scratch, making a video in iMovie and overlapping visual and audio components. Additionally, it was really challenging yet interesting to learn how to write for an audience that could be anyone. Anyone who stumbles onto my website will now have access to what I created and they could love it or hate it. Having to maintain a compelling tone while discussing my own opinion was a task that took practice to improve.
I really take for granted how challenging creating things online are. When I search something in Google, I expect it to pop up and then I continue to click my way around until I find what I am looking for. The time it takes to write the code, make sure it works and publish again and again was something I had never experienced. There is nothing more frustrating than publishing a website to realize it doesn’t work and having no idea what could be causing the problem. However, once you figure it out, fix it, type in the URL and see your work online, it is very rewarding.
Creating a website definitely takes more planning than I thought it would. I couldn’t just start on a path to see where it would lead me, if I did I would have to go back and change the code on each page I created. There needs to be precision when coding and ensuring that the pages and images are where they need to be in order to be published. Over the course of my three projects, the area I struggled the most with was the navigation bar. In addition to the technical difficulties of them, they create the layout for the whole project, so the links need to be enticing, correct, and in a relevant order. They seem so simple to begin with but they need to be carefully planned out. If the code is incorrect or leads to a place that does not have the link I need, then it is useless. It is crazy how big of a difference the smallest typed character can make. I often had to delete the whole page and start over because I did not know what the problem was. However, I feel that by encountering all of these problems, I was able to learn from my mistakes and improve as website designer. Another aspect of design that I learned and feel am pretty good at is creating different banners for my pages that give a preview of what the page will contain.
Living in the 21st century, I envision my literary future to be entwined with technology. Now that I have the skills to compose and present my work to a large audience via the Internet, I feel that I have a responsibility to do so. This class has helped me realize that at this point in my life and college career, I can no longer be a bystander and let my opinions be unheard. I have the tools to write what I believe, make it look nice and publish it. I now know how to back up my claims with research that is accessible. If someone doesn’t believe what I am saying, by clicking on the link, it’ll take you to the source. I definitely feel I will take all of the skills learned in this class and apply them in different situations I encounter. I am very proud of how much I learned and improved over these last ten weeks, and thank you for the opportunity to do so.