Its been a wild ride. Our last class was a really nice way to end the semester, and talking to Emily Chow helped to distill how far we’ve collectively come in this course.

Looking ahead, there are some things that I want to accomplish in the near future. While I don’t think I’ll become a web developer, I do know that I want to finish out my portfolio site with the comments I’ve received from a few people in the class. I definitely will add a PDF viewer for my resume, but I also want to populate my site with clips I’ve written. Currently, the blog portion only has things I’ve written for graduate school. I’d like to make my site a well-rounded reflection of the things I’ve done, and what I’ve written.

To do that, I want to restructure a few things with my website. I’d like to add a page that explains how and why I made the site, and silo written items by graduate coursework and published stories. I also want to make my final project template smaller portion of my blog, and explain what it was designed specifically for. To do that, I’ll  need to to a little more coding.

As for a timeline, I’d like to get this all squared away within the next few months.

As early as this week, I want to add the explainer page to showcase my web development skills, and also to explain where my clips come from.

In the next few weeks I want to work on manipulating the page structure more so I can add explainer pages that go before my graduate school work, published articles, and final project template so people visiting the site have a seamless transition between different parts of my site.

Finally, while I’m working on my capstone this upcoming semester, I want to add a blog about my reporting process and showcase the photojournalism that I’m going to have as a focal point of my piece. I’ll need to create a slideshow, similar to Molly’s, where I can post updates about my reporting. I’ll also want to make this a much more prominent part of my website. The build out for that will have to come in about a month or to, when I start going out in the field.

Overall, while I won’t be diving into teaching myself Python or Ruby, I will use my portfolio website as more of a living document. I’m going to make sure it stays fresh, and will update the content with my best work.

I’m really thankful to now have these additional tools that I’ve learned from class, and will be excited to see where by skills will take me.