Podcasting once Again
Michael Murphy has been tracked down! Huzzah! We recorded Episode 2 on Friday, April 18 in the recording booth in the basement of the HCC. It was a slightly different space but that is what worked with scheduling and Michael knew the systems well so that helped. We used Audacity to record the audio then exported it into my Google Drive so now I have it. The computer in the booth was an Apple computer, which is also unfamiliar to me so that was fun to navigate. Remind me to yell at Steve Jobs later for making things different (Just kidding, different is fine). Michael was an excellent help with all of that too. We spent like an hour talking about Preservation, and some other things. This one is definitely going to need to be cut down, but it was fun and Michael really added to the vibe, so shoutout to him for being awesome
Website Refining
I like the content on my website, but it looks slightly boring for my taste, I think it needs a little more sizzle. I also needed a logo that shows up on the web tab for it that isn’t the WordPress logo, so there’s still been a fair amount of touchup to be done, which I guess is a constant for improving anything. To try to find some sizzle I started playing with themes and wound up figuratively exploding my website into next week. That took some time to fix, which I eventually did, but WordPress is not always as easy as it seems I guess. After that I think I am going to keep what I have on that front, it is simple and easy to navigate, so why reinvent the wheel. I may change it later once I learn more but right now worrying about lots of other life things, I think simple is better for me. I did make a logo and a simpler version of it for the website icon, which I think turned out great. I used Canva to do that, it seemed the most effective way to go. That has now been added and I think the website homepage looks a lot better with just that. I also found a way to have the tagline as part of the title page, so now there is something saying what the website is in addition to the name. It is coming together nicely.
Research and Creativity Day Prep – Part 2
I started making my presentation slides, and these are turning out quite a lot different than I was expecting. I am trying to have a healthy balance of process and actual research in it, because the research is the point of what the process has led to, and it has been fun to try to craft that. I think I have everything I need for them done, now I just need to practice the presentation. I am presenting Friday April 25 in the morning, so I have time. I also know enough at this point I should not need too many notes. I am excited for this, getting to share it with more people is super cool!
Next Steps
As the semester nears an end I have one ambitious goal beyond presenting at Research and Creativity Day. I want to publish Episode 2 before the end of finals week. We will see if that is doable as the end of the semester does its thing, added to the end of college and having a bunch of other life things. But all I have to do is edit and make the transcript, cite sources, and put it up. It did not take too long with episode 1 once I figured out how things work, and since I have already figured it out it makes it that much easier. I am going to try for that. Wish me luck, I’ll give one more update here later on.