A Life Surfeited

I am super excited to have my website, “A Life Surfeited,” up and running! I must admit, however, that all the steps we took to get there are only slowly beginning to make sense to me. What is GoDaddy.com, what is Google 360, and why do I need them? I get that we bought our domain and hosting privileges through the GoDaddy site, but why do I need login information and a new email address? And now that I have my own live domain and WP account, do we still need the local server and WP site? I’m confused as to which we should be working in. But overall the  process was seamless and to me seemed like magic — a few simple steps and POOF I have my own website!

I have enjoyed playing around with themes and looking through the associated code. It’s given me some ideas of other modules I can manipulate for my final project, like altering the metadata for a comment box to ask commentators to tell me where they live and their favorite place they have traveled to. The “Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking” article was a good piece to read before really jumping in because it gave me pause about trying to “pretty” things up first. The concept of “design thinking” is one I’ve had in my mind before but didn’t know how to verbalize. It makes sense that design should be strategic and part of the brainstorm early on in project development. And I’ve always felt that designing with the user in mind is key. It’s so frustrating to visit a website and nothing is where is intuitively should be, or in fact is hidden. The user experience should be the priority, even if we are talking about a personal blog. I will look to my classmates to give me this type of feedback on my blog and will strive to provide productive and useful commentary about my experience of their site.

This week’s reading on GitHub Features, as well as last week’s in class lessons around project management, really helped me get a better grasp on how the features and tool in GitHub flow together. And how they are there to help guide me and my project to fruition. I’ve already set up my Notes to track my progress and am looking forward in a couple weeks to going in and offering feedback on my classmates work via Commits. Also, with GitHub’s powerful ability to host code, I now better understand why the developer I interviewed, Jamie, said he browses GitHub code repos to stay up-to-date on new and fresh things happening in the programming world.

I am out of town for work this week and haven’t had as much time as I hoped to get my project going. But I plan to spend all weekend next weekend making some real good progress.

Until next week, cheers and laissez les bon temps roulez (as they say here in New Orleans!),

Jane