Purpose

Your INDIVIDUAL CLASS BLOG will serve two important functions in our class:

  • For posting your READER RESPONSE BLOG entries (due for each work we read or view during the semester—see our assignment calendar);
  • For creating your FINAL PROJECT WEBPAGE (which will be your way of creating a multimedia online response growing out of all of your work during the semester. This project is in addition to your FINAL ESSAY.)

You will need to write a RESPONSE BLOG ENTRY for each book and movie we deal with in our class. This will provide us with a way to communicate with each other as we develop our understanding of the works we encounter.

In addition to serving as an aesthetically pleasing way to post your reading and viewing responses to our works, our frequent blog assignments will also prepare you for your final multimedia project by giving you weeks of hands-on experience before you even begin your final project.

Creating Your Personal Class Blog

In order to do this, you will need to create YOUR OWN BLOG as a separate entity outside of our Blackboard site. Some of you might already have your own blogs, but if not, there are several options available to you. The best platforms for your blogging if you are just getting started are WordPress and Blogger.

WordPress or Blogger?

Blogger (or BlogSpot) is a great resource for web development beginners and is hosted for free on the BlogSpot site. For our purposes in class, this will be a perfectly fine option. The two main potential drawbacks are 1. that your design tools and options are relatively limited, and 2. that your page is owned by Google. This means that if Google chooses to abandon the whole Blogger platform any time in the future, your site will be deleted. (I mention this only because Google, as it takes over more and more web media platforms, has abandoned some formats that people had considerable investment in.) But for our purposes, this option will serve you well and cut down on your learning curve (and time investment) if you aren’t already fluent with web development generally and WordPress specifically.

WordPress (and I’m referring to WordPress.org, not WordPress.com) is the superior choice only if you plan to continue developing your own website(s) in the future. I myself created our class website in WordPress. It offers both a very intuitive editing interface that any beginner can quickly become familiar with, while also offering very sophisticated tools and complete aesthetic and programmatic freedom for those who grow more adept at web design. The only potential drawback for some students is that while the web package itself is free, you have to have access to a web hosting service, which—unless you have free access to an account through family or work—costs anywhere from a few dollars per month to more (depending on which company you choose). Here is a link (and a very good web development resource site for all topics) for choosing a host if you don’t already have one.

Conclusions: Having said all this, once again, unless you already feel comfortable with web media and perhaps even have your own blog set up and running, I suggest that you at least begin with Blogger.com. I provide some links to important tutorials below—many of which I have created just for our class—for getting you started with whichever platform you end up choosing.

How to Get Started with Blogger.com

Here are some videos I have made and some outside links I have provided for getting started with the Blogger.com platform. You can find the Blogger page that I have created in these tutorial videos in my Blogger playlist or simply at My Blogger Page.

Setting Up and Customizing Your Site

VIDEO 1: Setting Up Your Blogger Site (20 minutes)

VIDEO 2: Customizing Your Blogger Site (16 1/2 minutes)

Embedding Media into Your Blogger Page

VIDEO 3: Embedding Images and Videos in Your Pages (8.25 minutes)

VIDEO 4: Embedding PDF Files (9 minutes)

You can use the iframe HTML element that I use in the video by copying and pasting the following code into your HTML editor (see video):

<iframe width="100%" height="400" src="https://ia801902.us.archive.org/34/items/NeuromancerWilliamGibson/Neuromancer%20-%20William%20Gibson.pdf"></iframe>

Remember to edit out the “URL” text and paste in the actual URL for your PDF file as the source (src) file. As you can see below, it works exactly the same here in a WordPress blog:

VIDEO 5: Embedding Word Docs and PowerPoint Presentations (13 1/2 minutes)

VIDEO 6: Embedding Google Maps (7 minutes)

Composing Your Blog Page on Your Phone

VIDEO 7: iPhone Blogging with Blogger (13 minutes)

Some external Blogger Phone Links:

VIDEO 8: Emailing Your Blogger Post via Your Phone (3.25 minutes)

Outside Source Tutorials

WordPress

As I mentioned above, the best blogging (and website creation) option for anyone seriously interested in creating a fully-functional and fully-customizable web presence is WordPress. If you are already conversant with this platform, then I urge you to consider furthering your skills in this area by developing your class blog in your own WordPress self-hosted site. If any of you are seriously considering this option, I can create some videos for you as well as for those using the above Blogger tutorials. In the meantime, here are a few videos created by others that can give you some greater clarity about what WordPress offers and how to get started.

Outside Source Tutorials for WordPress

A Word About WordPress Page Builders

Perhaps the most impressive and exciting aspects of building a website with WordPress is that you can go full geek and do all of the behind-the-scenes coding yourself (which I do at times) or you can use plugin apps that are called page builders, that is, programs that make your creation of attractive and fully-functional web page creation very easy. My favorite page builder is Elementor, which has a good free plugin and a superb paid one. (And no, I don’t get any commission or perks at all for mentioning them!)

But even right out of the box, so to speak, WordPress comes with an all-new fully customizable built-in editor called Gutenberg that makes creating your web sites almost as easy as something like Elementor. I built some of the pages in this class website with Gutenberg while others I created from scratch.

So my point is that while all of these options take a little time to get familiar with (perhaps too much time to start from scratch for our class), they allow you to make any website you can imagine without having to have in-depth technical knowledge.