Summary of Changes and this Blog’s Future
The biggest change that has been made to this blog over time has been the addition of personal touches, mostly notably photos of myself to allow for people to see the man behind the blog. I’ve also taken great care to expand the RSS feeds for blogs that I follow, as well as provide a few places of intrigue for users beyond this blog. I re-tooled the search bars to make it easier to find my various blog entries both via title of entry and category/subject matter. This is evident in that every story I wrote this semester was put in at least one distinct category. I acknowledged the importance of consistent hierarchical design, with each post following the same structure of an image at the top, then the first part of the entry, split off to encourage a complete reading, while not removing the main point of the story, with the two lines of the blog reserved to link to the original blog post I’m responding to and where I got my headline image from. I limited the amount of entries my readers would see, because I understand that most people won’t bother to read past what’s on the first page, but with less on that first page, they might just be encouraged to read more.
I found valuable tools in Storify and Google Maps, which have made me appreciate the importance of other forms of story telling and the connection to social media. This particular course has illustrated how the journalistic environment is still in a state of flux, with news ideas and visionaries capable of changing just how we perceive the web and what can be done with it going forward. As for this blog, I plan continuing it on my own personal WordPress blog, taking the stories I have written about, importing them over to that page and then continuing to write for that page. To make sure that it isn’t a carbon copy of this blog, I will not be using the same theme or elements, but I will keep the basic journalistic elements intact.
Image Courtesy of http://www.gamingenthusiast.net
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