About

This semester I created James’s Interactive Technology News Blog. This blog was designed to deliver the latest and greatest stories surrounding the topics in technology and what I found interesting about them. It was also a place where users were invited to exchange opinions about the latest headlines. Not only could they read the stories, they could also comment on them. During the course of the semester I achieved my goal of creating a Technology News Blog by adding many different features to the blog. Throughout the course I completed regular assignments in which I updated my blog to better suit its purpose; to do this I used a combination of tutorials and experimentation.
The first four enhancements that will be explained are the widgets. Adding widgets to my blog greatly enhanced the interface and usability. I selected useful widgets that would benefit users who come to my site for technological news. The first widget was the calendar. The calendar allows users to search through my posts by date. This is great for the users who have not checked in for a while and want to review some of my older news and posts, since the page only keeps a certain amount of posts, they can still find stories or comments that they may have missed. The second widget I added was the RSS feed. The RSS feed was connected to Slashdot.org and displayed their headlines. Since Slashdot is one of the most popular online news sites, I decided to also list their headlines on my site that way a user can get the best of my site, and the best Slashdot in one place. The third widget was a small container that had several links. This “must see links” widget is one of my favorite, as it allows users to connect to popular websites that deal with technology. The last widget I added was a Hits Counter, I added this counter so that users can see how popular the webpage is getting over time that way people can feel that they are part of a community and when they speak and comment on the headlines their voice is being heard. For my blog widgets helped me achieve my purpose of becoming a source of technological information by increasing the user’s connection to useful information.
The next 3 enhancements to my blog dealt with the interface. The interface of a blog one of the most important parts, it has to be unique, user friendly, and cool. There is a lot of competition on the web so I knew I had to separate myself, so I choose the “ChaoticSoul” interface by Bryan Veloso.” I chose this interface for three reasons. Firstly, because the color makes the text of the stories easy to read, second because the image on top was very mysterious and unique, and third because it is very easy to make things standout and look cool on-top of its black color. Next I added this “about” page which describes the purpose of the blog and my influences. The link to the about section can be reached below the “Slashdot” links. And finally, I added the title to the blog “James’s Interactive Technology News Blog” on the top.
The next set of enhancements had to do with posts themselves. I scoured the internet for interesting stories during the semester and posted summaries of the stories with links to their sources. I also included opinions that I felt about the stories and warnings like “don’t use internet explorer” in response to the latest exploit in the program. I also categorized all the post in to the “technology” category that I created, otherwise the category was “undefined” and that did not look professional. To enhance my blog even further I added a video to my blog that I embedded from YouTube. I understood from my experience with participating in online news communities that it is not only the interface that makes your site popular, but the material it contains. That is why I searched hard for the perfect stories to put on my blog during the course of the semester.

In conclusion I achieved my purpose to “update you with the latest and greatest stories surrounding the topic of technology and what I find interesting about them” by designing a unique and user-friendly blog that captures the users attention and provides useful information. I did this by updating my blog with widgets, information, videos, link’s, RSS feeds from other sites (for centralized news viewing) and an alluring interface. These changes were achieved through tutorials and experimentation with the resources provided by WordPress.