Assignment Requirement: What I Learned In Creating This Blog

I will take a quick detour from talking about workplace infrastructure in order to fulfill a requirement for my course assignment.

What have I learned through the blog creation process?

Since I have had prior experience creating blogs, the whole process was pretty smooth. What I am reminded of, though, is how much fun it is for me to create blogs. I love the way that blogs allow the opportunity to create a stream of thoughts around a particular topic of interest. I had a fun time identifying a theme that interests me right now, and I took joy in coming up with a domain name, blog description, favicon, and header image. This is so much fun to me that it is work that I happily stay up late to work on!

What were my successes?

My greatest success with blogs or other websites is always when I can get all of the various format pieces to come together to form a nice, cohesive presentation platform. When it comes to the look and feel, I always like to start with the header image. In honoring copyright compliance, I located a Creative Commons image approved for use on Flickr. Since the rights for this image permit adaptation, I was able to crop the image and add the title text for the blog. I am a visual person and so things like updating the header make me happy!

Another thing that brings me joy is when I can try my best to be respectful and compliant when benefiting from the work of others. I have a background of working in libraries, and so I have been trained in providing attribution. Thus, another success was when I managed to locate an attribution generator that I have used in the past to create the attribution for the Flickr image. The attribution can be found in the text widget located in the right column, under the "Tweets" widget.

Speaking of the Twitter widget, I was excited that I was able to get this embedded by following some very clear directions. By adding this widget, I was able to fulfill another course requirement for posting a link to a Twitter account, which in this case is an account that I already had created in the past.

What were my challenges?

As far as challenges, I know right now that my biggest challenge will be in maintaining this blog over the long haul. As life's commitments come up, it seems like every blog that I've ever been excited about eventually ends up waning and going silent. I always intend to return to the blogs and update them, but I think that given the time demands of working, being in school, and spending time with my family...I am regretfully pessimistic about my ability to keep this blog going any longer than my other blogs in the past.