Welcome to my Process Post 11
This week I will be talking about how I learned more about my theme’s source code, some minor changes to my website, what we did in class and some motivations I have for this week.
Readings:
I feel that the internet is a big place where there are all sorts of websites and subgroups where people post their thoughts, opinions, ideologies and debates with one another. Teens are exposed to all sorts of internet traffic and it is sometimes scary to think where they would land or what they would read. I read a related article explaining “counterpublics” as a subset of publics that stand in conscientious opposition to a dominant ideology and strategically subvert that ideology’s construction in public discourse. This obviously took me a couple of reads to understand, and yet I am a little lost.
Counterpublic is where like-minded people or people from specific groups come together to form their own little sphere to talk and exchange ideas. This sphere is protected from other people with more dominant ideologies, and this sphere is somewhat of a safe place. A parallel public, different from the everyday public. Marginalized people often live and exist on the outskirts of the general public sphere, they have their own sphere, called subaltern counterpublics. Other examples of counterpublics are queer dance clubs or feminist bookstores which target the needs of a specific group of people.
Moving on…
As this is one of my last process posts for this class, I would like to reflect on my journey from Week 1 until now. This website and I have come a long way from Process Post 1 until this point. From my last couple of posts onwards, keeping the peer review in mind, I started to make my content and process posts about phones more personal and opinionated.
I have learned a lot more, I have enhanced this website in ways I had no idea before, my content and development have had a meteoric rise, I have gotten feedback from multiple people, and I know a lot more about my “online self” and how people interact online. I found this class to be very engaging and quite simple to do well in compared to my first thoughts when I enrolled in it. It was definitely a lot of work and a lot of trials and errors till I decided on one thing, but it was worth it as I learned something after every trial. I made a lot of design decisions to cater to my audience and the tech-sphere. We also had a lot of independence on how we wanted to design our website and how we wanted to write our content, which I feel is a good idea as it unleashes our true creativity. I like how everything is marked toward the end of the semester as this gives us the flexibility to catch up on posts during busy weeks.
My theme has an option to customize its design and content from the front end, but some things can only be done through the back end through the theme file editor code. I wanted to resize the width and color of my sidebar which could done by modifying the code. I was able o successfully do so and in this process, I stumbled upon the grid gapping code, modifying header and footer features, and also the way comments and search results show up on the website. I didn’t change much but it was good to explore the possibilities coding opens to creators.
Short-term plans:
As we approach the end of the semester, I have started to edit some of my posts and peer reviews in accordance with the class concepts and new ideas that came up in my mind later on. I will also take in feedback from peer reviews and implement the necessary changes to make my website even better.
That’s all for now, stay tuned!
