Odds and Ends
- In case you missed it, the Technology Literacy Narrative assignment went up yesterday right after class. As I said in class, it’s a straightforward assignment prompt, but let me know if you have any questions about it. Publish the page and the blog post in response to your course site by 2/2. You will be revising this piece of writing.
- Time to start thinking about plugins on your site — if you haven’t activated Akismet yet, please do so in order to protect your sites from comment spam. (Here’s a help document with information about plugins.)
- Please also follow those instructions to install a plug in on your class sites that will include your featured images in your RSS feed: “Featured Images in RSS & Mailchimp Email” by PressWizards. Once you’ve activated, you’ll need to allow the plugin to connect with PressWizards and then configure the settings (I prefer that you set your feature image size to “twentyseventeen-featured-image” and have images centered above text (like this)
- I’ve shared a Google Drive folder with all of you and placed a podcast planning document in that folder. Please add stuff to that document before we meet tomorrow.
- As you read “Hello World” for class tomorrow, please complete the programming tasks Pullman walks you through. (If you need a text editor, check suggestions in the this week’s week ahead post.) Make an attempt to upload the files you create to the public_html folder on your domain, either through an FTP program or through File Manager in the cPanel. If you can get the files on your site, publish a post linking to them. If you can’t, then I’ll provide assistance and you can get them up later, but even if you’re leaving them in a folder on your computer and accessing them locally in your browser, still write the code.
Class Thursday
There will be a few minutes at the beginning of class for questions on the literacy narrative assignment. Then we’ll spend about half the class period in a podcast design charette.
In preparation, if you haven’t listened to a podcast recently try to listen to at least one episode of a podcast before class tomorrow. I recommend that you listen to an episode of Supercontext, but you can also listen to podcasts by students in my classes the last two semesters: Gamecast or Doing Video Games With … (note that because of space constraints neither of those links show the entire series of episodes the students recorded but they should give you a sense of what they did). Please also visit the Read | Write | Play Soundcloud page. Notice the graphics we’ll need for the podcast feed — a rectangular banner image and a circular profile image plus a square image for the podcast playlist.
Expect the charette to be chaotic and fast-paced, so come to class ready to bounce ideas and brainstorm!
During the second half of class, we’ll discuss bullshit information literacy and crap detection and also talk about how the first coding assignment went.
Note that Akismet is pay-what-you-want. You can move the slider to 0 to get your activation key for free.
Evidently the plugin for feature images only gives you 2017 size as an option if 2017 is your current theme. If you have changed themes, just set the size to medium or large instead.