A few days ago one of my teachers told me that my personal website for school, called a “Digital Portfolio” (or DP), needed some work. This came as no surprise because, well, my DP does need some work. This teacher went on to tell me that he has read my blog and was very impressed. He told me that if I put 10% of the effort I put into my blog into my DP then it would be awesome. I thought about this and went home, talked with my mom. She suggested that I integrate my DP and my blog.
Before I explain how I am going to do that, let me first explain a brief history of my Digital Portfolio. Alright, so it’s the first month of school and everybody is learning to use Dreamweaver to make frame-based sites (that’s so 90s!) but I, having already mastered Dreamweaver and gotten annoyed with its features, decide to make a beautiful XHTML/CSS/PHP based site. I get it down, making a small file-based content management system for it. Meanwhile, the school was working on getting their servers up and running and I did not have SSH access into my Documents on the school servers. I finally get it working after trying about 4 or 5 different combinations or things, by now it is probably mid or late October. I upload my site only to find out that the school does have PHP but they are running it in safe-mode and not giving access to the personal sites. I do some quick thinking and conclude I should save all of the pages from my local computer into html. I upload the files, change some quick paths in the stylesheet and then leave the DP alone until about January.
So at the end of each semester, our DPs are supposed to be completed and graded. Each student is supposed to present their DP to a panel of local leaders and volunteers and explain what they learned. My class, however, did not do this. Instead we presented what we learned about electricity in a project for physics. I spent a lot of time working on the electricity project and not a lot on my digital portfolio until the day after the presentation. By then, the old design was bugging me and I made a quick minimalist design and added a few projects.
I, again, left the DP to sit for another few months until the week before spring break when, again, I had a presentation based off the DP. I made a beautiful design that can be seen on the site at the time of this post. I worked for a while on it and threw some projects in (only the ones I needed), leaving the older ones alone in the cold. This brings us to last week and well, you know what happened then. - – -
Wow, not much of a brief history was it? So anyways, onto my über-special plan for the Digital Portfolio. I propose, moving my DP over to unbrain.net and run it off of Wordpress.
I feel I should explain this disadvantages first (even though you may not understand them at all). First, moving it to a different server makes everything my responsibility. I have to pay for all the extra (hah!) bandwidth and traffic that comes to the site which should be pretty easy because Dreamhost is extraordinarily generous in their bandwidth allotments. Also, there is the problem of forwarding the school server to unbrain.net. This shouldn’t be much of a challenge, more like an inconvenience.
For this project, as I mentioned before, I will use Wordpress which I already have running on my blog. It has a nice feature that lets you have individual pages, independent of the blog. I’m going hack up some way to have the pages show up on unbrain.net, shouldn’t be too hard. Basically this means I have an easy way to keep track of every single page I have in my DP.
One feature I find particularly useful in wordpress’ implementation of pages is the ability to choose specific templates for each page. With this, not every page will look like this blog and I can have specific templates for special project sites. (Don’t tell anybody but if I get this all done, I’m going to try this for my upcoming roller coaster project)
For the projects page, I plan to have a special category in my blog. The projects category could have a subsection for each subject. I could then have a specialized categories page that separated the entries into their respective sub-categories. Tags are fun, why don’t we throw some of those in too, then everybody can have fun.
There are probably a lot more features that I could probably use, or have fun making. Maybe some random features could find their way in there like a photo gallery. I would probably enable comments (if that is possible in wordpress) so people can talk about my work. If you haven’t realized, it’s all about building a community. Something about letting people give their feedback and having people respond to it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling inside and makes them want to come back.
Essentially I want to make my blog more school-centric and my school-site more blog centric. This is an attempt at something new. I don’t think anybody has tried this yet but I hope to start a trend and maybe get a teacher or two (yeah right!) working with something like this. Hey, if this does work and you are a teacher, talk to me and I should be able to set something up for you.
Thank you for listening (or reading) this wonderful rant that probably none of you have read all the way through. This rant is one of my longest yet and should be just over a thousand words if ecto’s wordcount widget is working correctly.
Author’s note: Hey mom and possibly Andy, I want your thoughts on this! Leave a comment or talk to me about your thoughts, thanks.
