Okay. Woof. The first week did not go well for me. For someone who is a senior in college and was born in 2000, you’d probably expect me to be a bit more tech savvy than I am. I repel technology. It abhors me. I had issues with almost everything- the first major hiccup being WordPress trying to convince me that I need an $180 subscription to run my site and access themes. No thank you! I was able to Zoom with Professor Polack and get Word Press up and running… I then had issues with embedding my YouTube video into into my post. It only allows me to embed a URL rather than a thumbnail to the video, so that is a bummer. Professor Polack suggested this may be because my clip is a short rather than a full video, so I did make a longer video that I will try to embed in this post. Fingers crossed!
YAY!! Look at that! I am learning…. and Professor Polack was right!!
And for anyone who wants to see my short
Most of my difficulty this week came from setting up my site. As mentioned above, the main things I struggled with were getting WordPress up and running and properly embedding my posts. I did struggle a little bit with Flickr, as some of my photos were not able to be uploaded, but other than that things went fairly smoothly. For my first few pictures on Flickr I uploaded older photos I’ve taken on trips and I noticed how the site organizes them chronologically for you and tells you what kind of camera the photos were taken with. I thought that was super cool!
I also really enjoyed YouTube more than I anticipated. For my short little introduction I filmed one of my aquariums (it’s a hobby of mine and it’s prettier to look at than me, what can I say) and when I checked it this morning it had over 500 views! There was even someone in the comments complimenting my set up, so that made me smile and was thoroughly unexpected. Maybe I will post more fish keeping videos!
I did not struggle with SoundCloud but of all the all of the sites it intimidates me the most. My older brother is an audio engineer and spends an insane amount of time working on SoundCloud and other similar audio editing platforms, so I am a little traumatized by seeing what he can do. I did not realize that people use Soundcloud for things other than music, so I am excited to explore other content like podcasts.
Finally, what I struggled the least with was Twitter. I love Twitter. I made a new account just for this class to keep myself organized and on track. I already connected with a classmate and we follow each other and chatted in Direct Messages. I did the daily create yesterday and today just to get more practice in, but I think I did much better with today’s.
You’re not alone with the struggles. I feel like I haven’t evolved much from my caveman brain when I’m attempting to do this.