Author: elkee

I finished my last mock consultation, kind of like the first final of the semester. Fortunately, this was not nearly as stressful as a real final. It was pretty much all troubleshooting, and I felt like a genius.

May Day had an issue with the safety certificate for her website, being that she just… forgot to verify her identity as a human being. I was so fast to figure out the problem and give a solution for it and I felt like I was a genius for actually knowing how to do that.

This was definitely the most prepared for a mock consultation I felt this semester. Things felt easy, and when I ran into something I was unfamiliar with / didn’t really understand, I had a relatively easy time figuring out what had to happen to fix the issue. Block themes… why are you evil…

I am currently one studio training (video) and a name-tag away from full-fledged consultancy¹

1. this is not a real word ︎

Our task was to break a website, I definitely succeeded. The first step was to change the WordPress and site addresses, which i did. I then found that I had no way of accessing my website. Oh no!

I did some searching after that. Essentially just googling the error message it gave me. “Not Found. The requested URL was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an error document to handle the request.”

The first site I found was NameHero, with their guide: Five ways to fix error 404.

The guide was not particularly helpful to me, it seemed targeted toward people trying to access websites that did not belong to them. I had to find a different guide.

My next (and final discovery was this Cloudways guide. I read through it, and decided the easiest solution to my problem might be to clone the older site, see if it would load properly. I did exactly that and, lo and behold, it worked!! Welcome back to the world: dgst101.acfolio.org!

Five Nights at Freddy’s: The Most Concise Timeline You’ll Ever See – Youtube

Heres the FNAF video! I couldn’t get it to embed for whatever reason but it’s fine.

Since starting this project, I think the most important thing that I learned is that I do not enjoy being on video, and that made this project pretty difficult. BUT!!!! I made it! Many thanks to Angela and Jasper for agreeing to be the actors here by the way, y’all deserve awards. Anyway, onto the process of it all.

It all started with a graphic:

The main purpose of the whole project was to come up with an April fools workshop idea. It took me a little while to come up with something that was funny, and I may or may not have been a little inspired by Zoe’s character “Mayday” (is that how it’s written? or is it “May Day?”) from our mock consultations. I thought the ongoing classroom rivalry between the characters in our mock consultations was funny, and ran with that. The idea? What if Mayday learned to hack from a DKC workshop and took that knowledge and ran with it. She could hack in to her rival’s project and take it down. Obviously this is not the kind of thing we typically teach here at the DKC, so I figured it wasn’t a bad choice.

The next thing I had to tackle was the video. I really am not super comfortable working with video. I can do it, I have a good amount of experience with it, and I’m not awful at it. But I don’t think I like it. I started with a story board. I used the story board partially as a brain dump space, partially as a script, and partly as an actual storyboard.

Overall it was a good experience, and I’m glad I powered through it, despite my struggles.

Happy (day after) April Fools!

Video killed the radio star??? Maybe… Anyway, for the introduction to video editing assignment I had a really difficult time coming up with something to do. Maybe because of the time limit, maybe because I just wasn’t feeling particularly creative in that moment. Regardless, what follows is my incredible, very well made, very not boring self introduction.

The canva editor was really strange to use. I’ve used Premiere Pro, I’ve used Clip Champ, I’ve used iMovie. This was like all of those and yet somehow like none of them. It took me a while to adjust to where things were. I liked how smooth the interface looked and the immediate access to the libraries and everything else. I did not like, however, that you had to zoom in in the dock in order to look at shorter clips, stretching clips / shortening them was difficult too, as other buttons would pop up in the way. Sometimes you’d be trying to click a button (like the transitions or add button between slides) and it would just… disappear?? Not very easy to use, but I managed. I liked how many cute templates there were, but a lot of them were locked behind pro, with nearly all of the audio and music locked behind a paywall as well.

Sources: (All Red titles are links)

Music:
John Williams, Across the Stars (Love Theme from “Star Wars: Attack of the Clones”)

Images:
Star Wars Images:
Personal screenshots from prequel trilogy movies, Art by Hai Haung

Album covers:
Screenshots from Apple Music

Subjects:
Clip-art from Canva free library

Video Games:
Jedi Fallen Order Game poster: pulled from EA Listing
Fallout 4 Image: Games Radar Article

In re-watching this mock consultation, I think the first thing I learned was that I move my hands a lot when I talk. I am apparently a big fan of gestures and waving my hands around. Anyway…

This one was a struggle! I genuinely had almost no experience with special text formatting in WordPress, mostly just cus it had never come up as something that I needed to try. Why is formatting in WordPress so hard???? Why did they make it like that???? Why do you have to find an entirely new block just to have indented text??? It truly confuses me. Regardless, I think that I did really well introducing myself and making it clear that, while I knew enough about what I was doing, I do not know everything about the wonderful little program we call WordPress.

We talked about it after my consultation as well, but I also did well with working alongside “Mayday”, and not just relying on their screen or making them test a bunch of things on theirs. I got an impromptu training moment too! During my consultation, the WiFi went down and we talked about what we might do in case something happens during a consultation that means we can’t complete the task.

The Suggestions:

• Check in with them, are we close enough to done?
• Wired computers might still work! You can go test to see if the internet works there.
• Offer to hang out until WiFi is back if you don’t have another consultation or class afterward.
• Get their email or write the steps down step by step / give them a guide to get the task done.

I need to get better about remembering what to do at the end of a consultation. Things like encouraging follow up, inviting them to stay, and possibly referring additional resources if needed. I also completely forgot that there’s a survey that gets sent out about how we did in our consultation. That feels like something I should remember.

I feel really confident about my ability to get through the first few steps (setting up website, diverting people from making bad website name decisions, etc.) of a consultation when setting up a website. I am also pretty good at giving examples of what people do on their websites.

The most difficult part of the consultation was honestly the WiFi being as bad as it was… I had to make so many jokes about how bad the WiFi or come up with things to fill up the time while waiting for things to load. Who knew small talk was difficult?! (me, but still) I also had trouble when the theme that I recommended did not work like it usually does and I was very confused because I had never seen it do that before.

I started with introducing myself and asking about the assignment so that I had at least a small idea of what May Day needed on their assignment. Then, as we worked through setting up the subdomain itself, I tried to tailor my own advice and questions toward the kind of website May Day said they needed.

I’m pretty good at explaining more complicated concepts in simple terms! Specifically making comparisons and metaphors for what a function does in order to explain it without having to rely too much on jargon.

I would really like to work on how nervous I get. I said “um” approximately 57 times.

Today was spent mostly on accessible web design and the bad design page, loving entitled REALLY BAD web design :), which can be found here: https://dkctraining.acfolio.org/really-bad-web-design/

My main page, which is where I installed the accessibility checker, had a few inaccessible issues that were revealed but unfix-able. These included ARIA elements that were hidden, heading order issues, etc, that I would be able to fix without going into the code.

The page itself is… bad.. intentionally!! Shes kinda ugly, with photos that have no alt-text. She has social media buttons, all of which lead to the wrong sites. She has words that move quickly and are poorly formatted, and she has buttons that lead absolutely nowhere, and don’t have names that would tell you otherwise. BOOO BAD ACCESSIBILTY BOOO.

Today for training I created a new site through Sites@UMW, which can be found at
https://swlines.umwsites.net/

It was a really odd experience, I had already used the system before to create a website for a Fashion History assignment, but that was like… 3 semesters ago… so I had kind of forgotten how different the WordPress instance was over there.

If I had to explain the difference between Sites@UMW and DoOO to a friend, I think I would have a hard time. Something like “DoOO is a full website builder, while Sites@UMW is a bare-bones site builder.”
I might have to go into more detail though… I’m finding rather quickly that it is awfully difficult to think of non-jargon-y ways to describe a lot of these things. How do y’all do it???

On another note, did you know that in the deathstar 1, they put in the weapon last, but in the second deathstar, it was one of the first things to go in? Because it was meant to be a trap for the rebels, the big guy (Sheev Palpatine) (The Emperor) , decided to put in the weapon first in order to lure them there.

RANTING AND RAMBLING AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED (I’M SORRY)

More might be added later, who knows (not i)

What a surprise!! The disabled girl has more thoughts on accessibility! I wanted to separate this post from the other because these are more personal thoughts, generally unrelated, and I didn’t want to write a post that was 87 years long.

I know that they don’t really touch on it in the video / presentation because it’s meant to be sort of a short overview, but there is SO MUCH more when it comes to disability.

For example: The Models of Disability

Since Disability Studies became a more acknowledged field of study, there’s been a lot of research into different models and perceptions of disabled people and disabled society.

The Northeastern University Library has a decent page on this: Models of Disability – Disability Studies

There are different types of models, and then different models under those types. Deficit models, like the Medical model referenced in the presentation, are models that view disability as a deficit, or a negative aspect of someone’s identity. They often are oriented toward FIXING a perceived issue, and often blame difficulties caused by disability on a person, their health, and/or their past.

Another type of model is the social type. These models, such as the social model, or the human-rights model, view issues caused by disability as a failure of the society / system that has made it difficult. These models do NOT consider disability a failing of the individual, and often do not consider it something that must be fixed, but rather accommodated for and/or made normal*.

* “made normal” as in no longer considered out of the norm / weird / an extenuating circumstance. I do not mean “make everybody disabled”