html am I right?

     Let me start by saying that I have very minimal experience with any sort of coding. My involvement with the subject stopped during the time I had a Myspace. In any case this project took me a little bit of time.

    I struggled with the very first steps as I could not get my TextEdit to change the title of my file from "test.html.txt"to make it compatible as a website. Every time I opened the website I was taken to a white screen with codes. I scoured the internet to fix this mishap, and it took me down a rabbit hole of other website makers having similar issues on MacBooks. I suddenly thought to my self "maybe this is a much more serious and complicated issue that is bigger than this project." 

I called a classmate for help. He was fresh out of tech ideas. After troubleshooting for a long while I finally decided to ask Dr.Prins for help. She then told me to simply rename the file and remove the "txt" part of the name, and miraculously it worked! 

I was frustrated, but relieved for me to say the least. I had no idea how simple the fix was, and I had taken most of my time trying figure out how to get the "txt" part out of my folder.  However, I will say after the "minor" mishap it all began falling into place, and towards the end it was getting a little easier. Or easy in a way that I was finally understand what to do and where to paste certain things.

This experience has only emphasized how much I still struggle with technology after being online for months. This also highlighted the idea of digital literacy as I assumed prior to this that I was pretty tech savvy (I obviously am not).

The Great Digital Rhetoric & Literacy Make-Off: Part 1 Image.

 

With my final project in mind, I knew I did not want to make anything that would create a link to an external website or anything that would be complicated to use. Instead, I opted to create a larger image of various smaller images of creatures/things/people that are important to me: my children, my dog, my partner, my parents, and my schooling. I did this with the intention of making it simpler for those that wanted to stick to visiting my blog and seeing the image pasted with my text.

            I set off to create this collage on an app initially, however I had to reassess my chosen platform a few times as it was not listed in the resources section of the assignment. This led me to download Photoshop, a program I always wanted to use but never had the chance to. The initial downloading part was not very complicated, but it was long and tedious. Once I was able to play around on the program, I found myself lost and frustrated. Most editing icons that were meant to edit images were not working for me. I started stacking pictures in the main image square, but they were not moving correctly. Then, to my dismay, in the middle of moving pictures my laptop crashed :’(

 After spending an hour downloading, playing and, giving up on Photoshop, I returned to the resource page on Blackboard. Finally, I gave up on “challenging myself” and went toward the collage maker BeFunky. Like the first app, I was very familiar with the interface of the website and thus made it easy to navigate. I simply picked an already made template and dropped the images in the main image square. It was a HUGE contrast to the difficulties I faced with Photoshop. 

The editing portion was also very simple to follow: Once an image has been selected, a square appears and asks a few options for the image. You can “delete the image,” “delete the cell” (this option deletes the image square, which changes the template automatically), or “edit the image.” If you should select “edit image,” then a few other options appear. However, in my specific experience, I did not use these options as my images didn’t need much editing. The only portion of the website I did interact with was the boarder colors, which again was very simple.

            If I had more time with this project, I would most likely not use BeFunky. Collage makers are dated, and if I wanted to make a collage, I would have liked one that allowed me to use my pictures in their entirety (One of the reasons why I love that Instagram allows multiple upload). Also, one that doesn’t stick to a strict template as I wanted to add so much more. This is one of the reasons I really wanted to use Photoshop, but amongst other reasons, my laptop couldn’t handle the program.