I couldn’t handle Unity Blue, so I compulsively hammered away at a draft of the new design. It’s up on the blog pages now, and eventually, the main page will sport a similar look, but with more content.
Lucky you, getting to see all my layout drafts. If this was a real website, I’d be making all these edits secretly and unveil them on some special day. But this isn’t a real website, yet, so you get all this stuff. And two posts in a row about being under construction.
Sweet.
In anticipation of a site-wide redesign, I’m messing with the blog layout, so it’s going to look really ugly for a while. Of course, it will look more awesome than you can possibly imagine when I’m done with it. Or maybe I’ll lose steam and it will forever be stuck in “Unity Blue” or whatever this garbage is.
(yeah, I realize a site-wide redesign doesn’t make sense until there is a wide site to redesign. That’s part of the redesign. Making a real site.)
While I’ve been neglecting this blog, I’ve been working on school projects, including a post for the blog of my research group, Project New Media Literacies. This is cross-posted from there!
Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication “Transmedia Navigation.” But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.
First non-meta blog post in a long time!
Tonight, at 9, a classmate of mine has set up a Talkshoe show for the classmates to chat about whatever we feel like, hoping that we are interesting enough to engage more than moms. In any case, you can download the thing when it’s done as a real podcast. For the real details, I just copied her blog post for you:
While poking around the intraweb to find phone-post blogging applications, I came across TalkShoe, which is a new community podcasting site that basically lets you set up an online radio talkshow, except you could also use it to live audio blog with a bunch of other people, record a conference or class, or vent your frustrations about Governor Palin with a group of strangers (or friends) on the internet immediately after her latest TV interview (ahem).
To test it out, I have set up a weekly “talkshow” for Sunday nights at 9p called “MIT Media Nerds”. The first “episode” will be 30 minutes, and I’ve recruited some fellow CMS nerd compatriots to call in, so I won’t be talking to myself…although any TalkShoe users presently on the site can also choose to call in when the episode is live. How can I participate, you ask?
On Sunday at 9p, you can either call 724-444-7444 (call ID 26622) and start talking, or go to http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/26622 and start writing in the chatroom, or talking from your computer mic, either as a guest or registered user. Friends abroad, you can also call in via Skype (but in order to use Skype, you have to download TalkShoe’s voice app for free, so you might as well just go online). If you’re too busy to call in, fear not! Each episode will be archived as a podcast on this and other sites.
What will we be talking about? I dunno. Odysseus, video games, politics on YouTube, the latest George Clooney film, whatever. Call and find out!
Ta-da!
When I started this blog, it was going to be something to help me learn HTML and keep me motivated to work on various edifying activities. Even with the long gaps in posting (last entry July 28…), I think it succeeded in that, for the most part.
There’s not a whole lot to add about what filled out the rest of the summer; it was more of the same, and some of the different (first trip to Cape Cod, other assorted excitements). School technically started three weeks ago, although real classes and so on have only been on for half that. Classes have been great (thanks for asking), and my work as a research assistant with Project New Media Literacies has been engaging.
So, this isn’t intended to be a post-mortem analysis of how well I did what I set out to do in my first post, but rather a change of gears. Grad school is astronomically more work than bumming around for the summer with a blog, so it is possible that post volume might go down, if that were even possible. However! Thanks to all the work I’m doing, I’ll have more frequent things to share, including blog posts written for other blogs (they should have looked into my blogging track record before asking me), and various reflections and announcements related to my busy and soon-to-be-more-busy life.
I need to sit down and figure out what I want this space to be, and that should hopefully happen soon enough for me to start yakking about all the wonderful things (and presumably some less than wonderful things) that the school year brings. At the very least, I’ll clean up the dead links and broken formatting in the sidebar and maybe even toss in a CSS redesign (which will be refreshed as a result of our Workshop class, where we will learn such things as Processing and CSS and Final Cut Express).
That’s it for now, stay tuned for more exciting tidbits, hopefully.
