The title of this post refers to the image I chose as the “logo” for my website…
I had a great deal of difficulty setting up my personal WordPress site. First of all, there must be a better way to get to the admin part of the site than by going to Reclaim Hosting, logging in, and fiddling around with links until navigating to the WordPress app, and locating the middle link from there. Once in WordPress, I found myself stuck with a theme I did not remember choosing and it took me a long time to figure out how to get rid of it and start with a new theme. While I initially used a background image, I found it much easier to keep the background white so that I could better see what was going on. I also struggled with changing the colors of the text because the only color option I could find was for the background color. Once I settled into the theme, I managed to put together some pictures to correspond with the three boxes in the middle of the page, which I renamed “soccer,” “academics,” and “travel.” Creating the “about” page was fairly straightforward, and, surprisingly, I had an easy time adjusting the background and text colors of some of the headings using CSS. However, I was sometimes unsure what the labels of some of the sections were since the CSS box was blank and nothing is labeled “H1” or “body” on the website itself.
After this class, I hope to use this platform to blog photographs and written posts from my trip to the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Tanzania this spring. If possible, I will include a digital component of my independent research project that I will conduct using the Boyd-Niles Scholarship in Tanzania after the program. During this class, however, I plan to tailor the site’s purpose to whatever Digital Humanities project I will work on. I hope that I can use the site to create a meaningful contribution to Digital Humanities scholarship. A major drawback of “rolling my own” website is that I will have to work on many aspects of it from scratch while a hosted service or social media platform would already have options there for me to use. For example, it would probably be much easier to upload a photograph to a hosted service or social media site where everything is in one place than my private website where I need to figure out how to fit and format all of the information that I want to display. A benefit of rolling my own website is that I have greater freedom to present the information as I see fit. I am not restricted to any standardized template, but I can still use commonly accepted notations, such as underlining links, to guide with the viewer. As I begin this process, I foresee it being quite a challenge with many obstacles along the way. I am sure that I will continue to work and find a way to overcome the difficulties to create an excellent website to facilitate my project.
