This post is just to check in and reflect on how my blog is doing so far. Right now my website still feels real raw and empty, mostly because I’ve only been posting for class, but I’m getting the hang of it and I feel like I’ve learned a bit about WordPress and blogging in general. I’m feeling better about the layout, and if I potentially want to add more pages to the top of the blog, I feel comfortable and confident that I can do that. I also know more about posting pictures and text together, making links look appealing, and using tags and categories. My stats are probably average compared to other classmates, nothing special or too out of the ordinary. I definitely see that more people tend to visit on Mondays and Tuesdays, but that’s probably all my fellow classmates being good and not procrastinating on their homework! As far as the “real world” goes, and in comparison to other health blogs, my blog has a long way to go, but I’m not entirely disappointed in how the blog is going so far. I haven’t posted too much about healthy eating and lifestyle, but I have a few followers that are trying to do similar things (you rock!!) I would need to post a lot more content and a lot more useful content that aligns with more of the purpose of my blog and its goals.
Healthy Bloggin’ Potential
I think my blog really has the potential to fit in with the world of health bloggers because we ultimately have the same goal of sharing ideas and can rally around the goal of being healthy. A lot of health blogs that I have checked out during this course all have a “story” behind them about the author, and have a lot of the same common elements that I would share, such as recipes, tips and advice, ideas of places to shop for ingredients, perhaps reviews of healthy food items, etc. A lot of health blogs also use a lot of images to supplement all the text, which is something I have been doing here.
One thing that I think I can add to this conversation is my realistic personality. I’m really busy, and I know a lot of people are really busy too but still want to be healthy. I also really DON’T love exercising, and I don’t understand how other people do. Also, I know kale is nasty (butttt so good for you) AND the flavor can easily be masked with banana and almond milk. I think when I read a lot of health blogs where they say “I LOVE eating healthy” I immediately can’t relate. I’ve thought about two categories or even tabs that I could add – one for recipes, another one that is more of a “Help! I’m don’t know where to start” – where I can post “step 1- get a nutribullet (best thing I ever did- cheap here or here) step 2- buy some kale, bananas, almond milk, and oatmeal. It’s the fastest go to shake that is healthy and doesn’t taste like buttcheeks.” I think there are some people who could appreciate my honesty and relate to it.
Update:
A typical daily shake for moi:
Yes, it’s a Disney Tumblr. Yes that’s Piglet 🙂
Powerpuffed!
This week’s assignment was really cute and fun. I decided to Powerpuff myself because I used to watch Powerpuff girls all the time when I was younger (and had a Powerpuff girl themed birthday party! Hehe.) The platform itself was point-and-click which was very easy to use. When things are too complicated, I find I don’t have a lot of patience unless I’m really very motivated to do something. For something fun like this, I would have moved on very quickly if it wasn’t easy to use.
I like this type of fan art because it makes my reflect a bit on who I am and what my character would be like based on my character as a person. The physical part was pretty straightforward for me, I picked features that looked most like I do in real life- brown hair, eyes, a little tan, etc. Then you have to decide what your superpower is going to be by answering some questions. I answered again based on what I’d do in real life. My superpower would be healing, I’d most likely mediate if there were problems among my friends because I’ve been asked to do that a few times before, I’d like to be known for curing a disease, and so on and so forth. I’m the “friend defender” which I think is cute and I think the description is pretty accurate. I think my friends and my coworkers know I’ll call someone out for being a jerk and I do tend to root or at least sympathize for the underdog in sports and competitions.
Let’s…Make…a Deal!
I decided to link to a picture of fruits and veggies in wheel since it aligns with this being a health blog. On numerous occasions I’ve seen the “color wheel” drawings with fruits in veggies that basically describe the nutrients found in fruits and veggies that are a certain color and all the health benefits of those nutrients. Very rarely do you find one that looks “real” so to speak. I feel like I could walk around a farmers market and come across something that looks this. Plus it’s fun and makes me think of game shows!
If I understand correctly, I can use this picture for a number of reasons. First, under “Purpose”, my use of this picture is for reasons that favor “fair use”: teaching – since this is for school, comment – since I commented on the picture above, restricted access – since this is most likely going to be seen by our specific class. This also comes up again under “Amount” – our class is small. This picture also only makes up a portion of my blog- it isn’t the main focal point.
Under “Nature”, I could fall under all three of the “fair use” points: this blog is published, it is nonfiction based, and (I believe) important to favored educational objectives. The last point I’m not 100% sure I understand, but I think it’s “favored educational objectives” because I’m saying “eat fruits and veggies” not “how to murder your roommate and get away with it”? As far as “Effect” goes, I’m honestly not sure. I’m not technically making any copies, and I don’t believe my posting this will have any effect on the market.
I feel like this language is a bit gray and I could swing certain things either way with a “well technically…”, but I definitely see the value in finding out the usage terms for media because I’ve heard there can be very serious repercussions for not complying to these terms!
Broccoli Dog
The name of the meme I selected for this blog is called “Broccoli Dog,” which Knowyourmemes says is part of a series of dog memes, like “I Have No Idea What I’m Doing” Dog, ” Phteven” or “Pun Dog”. I’ve seen a lot of these on a variety of different social media platforms, and I think they’re great because they’re really easy to like (because dogs!!!) and they’re relatable and funny.
I learned from the website that this meme was actually made somewhere around 2005. It’s captioned/known/tagged as “do not want dog”, particularly when it first came out following another trend of “do not want” and “do want” memes. Its popularity dropped a significant amount but it has recently regained popularity in 2015 under the name “Broccoli Dog” and was even more popular this second time around under the new name/tag.
I think this meme is appropriate for my blog because of how relatable it is. I completely understand this dog, and I know a lot of people feel this way about steamed broccoli. If anyone has dogs, you know they’ll eat just about anything. My little booger at home will beg and beg and follow me around the kitchen hoping I’ll drop something. Always. But when I drop lettuce or broccoli, she actually smells it, steps back, and looks at me. I swear in my head she’s saying, “Stupid human, why are you giving me this crap?” I feel you, dog.
As a result of brainwashing as a kid I just so happen to like broccoli, but frankly I’m not there yet where I think veggies taste awesome and I’d rather have them than ice cream. I think most people are in this category, so that makes this a great meme to get people to see “we’re all in the same boat here!” and “no, I don’t love veggies” but I still get a serving once/day(ish..).
There’s hope!!
Help me, help you
I think the online world is amazing! There’s so much interesting content online right now, and it’s fun to find new things to read. I remember looking at websites like “StumbleUpon” and whatnot, and spending hours looking at the most random mix of content. I found some interesting websites and tools that I even used for school (like thesaurus.com before it was really big, and converters before google had that so readily available.)
Sometimes people don’t know what they’re looking for, and they find it by chance. The idea of this blog is to support everyone who is trying to be healthy by being very realistic that it’s not easy. If you know anyone who is in that boat or even if you just enjoy reading, you could share the link to my blog on a social media site. I think Twitter and Facebook would be the most natural and easiest because they allow you to write a little bit about the blog and seem like they’re more for sharing this kind of content. These sites also make it really easy to re-share.
When promoting things it’s easiest to just be honest and share information without pushing so hard. You could say you think my blog could really help anyone looking for motivation or support, or you could say something quick like you enjoy reading my blog. Sharing my blog with anyone in your circle would be incredibly helpful to me because it will allow me to grow my audience, share my message, and hopefully help support some people who need it.
The Best and Worst Thing You Will Ever Watch!
A few years ago, I went through what was probably the worst time of my life, ever. Ever. I knew I had digestion problems, but none of the doctors I initially saw would diagnose me. I went to my primary physician several times before he sent me to a gastroenterologist, who sent me to another gastroenterologist, who sent me to a proctologist, who sent me…you get the idea. And after trying a gluten-free diet (even though I didn’t have celiac’s disease), eating tons of fiber and veggies, I felt better but not “cured.” Then I was told to cut dairy, and see how that goes — a lot harder than it seems because I LOVE Ben & Jerrys. I just got so sick of hearing that I have “young persons disease” when I knew there was something seriously wrong. They were doing x-rays and tests, and eventually they finally came up with something concrete. I got mixed reports of benign and malignant. Doctors couldn’t agree. INSANITY!!!
It’s actually a bit of a blur to me. Fortunately everything is great now (yay!) I went about my merry life for two years before a friend told me to watch this documentary called Forks Over Knives.
For those two blissful years, I completely felt like the innocent, poor, little victim Teresa. But this documentary really open up my eyes and made me realize that I had a greater role in my health than I had initially realized. It was one of the most fascinating documentaries I have ever seen and as cheesy as it sounds, it really did change my life.
I encourage you to watch it with someone, because the temptation will be there to yell at the screen “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”
Watch it!
My favorite blog!
First I want to say WOW, Jing is so easy to use! As I type this, my screencast is uploading…64.4 MB out of 135.3 MB! I’m a little nervous just because I’m again on my crappy laptop that has a mind of it’s own and doesn’t always cooperate. I’m also nervous because I talked the full 5 minutes so my file is larger, which could be affecting the upload speed. I just found it really easy to talk about things I love about the blog I chose.
I decided to do my screencast assignment on a blog called Extra Petite. It’s one that I love because of how useful and easy to use I find it. I used Jing to do the screencast, and really liked the software and think I could use this one again in the future. I downloaded it with ease from the link provided, and watched the little tutorial thing even though we reviewed it a little in class. The tutorial was quick and to the point, which was great, and I think most of it has to do with the simplicity of the software. There are only a few buttons, and once you know where to click, it’s easy.
I pressed capture and selected my entire screen that I wanted to display in the video, then selected a mic option. The first time I did this I selected one that maybe was connected to an external camera I use to use but don’t have anymore, so no sound came out in my screencast video. I tried to start a new screencast, but that mic was already set as the default. Jing settings were easy to find, and under audio I changed the source to my internal mic and all went well for the second video.
All in all, I enjoyed this assignment and it made my think about features that I like about other blogs that I would eventually want to add to mine. Like I mentioned in my screencast, the author of Extra Petite knows her audience, and it made me think “who do I want my audience to be and what features would they like to see on my blog?” Food for thought.
Commercial Fail!
I appreciated the warning that this assignment would be difficult, so I started working on it pretty early knowing that I’d probably get frustrated, but I didn’t think I would fail at this assignment as bad as I did!
I wanted to find some happy instrumental music, some “twinkly” sounds or techno fun without much lyrics. On account that I literally only have 7 songs in my iTunes (not including those free U2 songs), I had to go look up mp3 video converters. It seems like a lot of them aren’t around anymore, but I finally found one and decided to mix “Domino” by Jessie J and Rita Ora’s “How We Do”. They’re both up beat and mixed pretty well!
I downloaded audacity onto my laptop, and opened the first MP3 “Domino.” The song starts with some audio, but the first lyrics are “I’m feeling sexy and free…” and the rest of the lyrics really aren’t that great for my commercial either. I looked up some tutorial videos online and found one that easily explained how to adjust the vocals in a song. I used the “split stereo track” feature in audacity, inverted the vocal one, and then made the two parts of the song “mono,” and that made a perfect audio background. You could still hear Jessie J’s voice, but it was very faint and the focus was on the audio.
If I knew better, I would have picked two songs that were more similar in speed. “Domino” is much faster than “How We Do”, but when you change the speed of audio, you change the pitch and it just sounds very different. I watched a bunch of videos on how to adjust the tempos of the two songs to fit each other but I couldn’t quite get it. I really only wanted to chorus of the Rita Ora song where she sings “How we do”, but I ended up making her almost sound like a chipmunk, which wasn’t what I was going for.
I’ve been doing my assignments on my tablet because my laptop is ancient and does not function very often, but since we had to download software for windows, I had to use it. I started having issues with my laptop after working on it for 5 hours or so– (getting the blue screen of death)—but a few days later it started working again. The software also kept freezing…or maybe it was just a lot for my computer to handle. After reviving my laptop and finding the entire 2nd song nowhere to be found in the project, I moped around and decided to forgo the second song and just put my voice against the “Domino” audio.
Of course, when it was time to export the file, an error comes up asking me to “modify the metadata” and that the disk is full and bunch of crazy looking characters. I tried exporting to every format and got my nerdiest friends to help, but now my laptop is dead and I’ve given up
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3V4rP97xJPAQlAtcVM5RkRqaWR5RlJQVDRPemktRVExUDVV/view?usp=sharing
Are all small decisions really this hard?
I couldn’t even think of a picture I wanted to use as the main background. This was probably the most difficult part of this assignment. I do not consider myself a creative person, so I knew when I read this assignment it would be something I’d have to sleep on. Part of the problem stems from the fact that I wanted this blog to include it all! Exercise, nutrition, tips for your mental health, etc. It’s probably too broad of a topic to summarize in one picture. Luckily we could play around with layers to try to include more images of what I’d like to write about.
I’ve used Pixlr once before, so that was my first choice. I found it easy to use and playing around with colors and fonts and images is something I like (and probably waste a little too much time with at work—shhhh.) I did NOT know about the advance search feature for licensing criteria! That’s incredibly useful to me, and I will definitely use that again in the future. For the main background layer I found a few pictures of fruits and vegetables organized by color, but they were a little too busy and didn’t posses that “clean” feel I was going for. Then I found this plain citrus image and thought it had enough color and was aesthetically pleasing.
For the other images, I originally was thinking of using an image of a woman in a yoga pose like the one below. I used the magic wand feature in Pixlr to remove the background and then place it on the citrus picture. Even after increasing the contrast and giving the woman a tan, the colors didn’t blend nicely. That’s how I got the idea of the silhouettes: they’re simple, clean, and relatable.
All in all I would say it wasn’t hard to use the photo editing software, and now that I’m more familiar with WordPress, I was able to edit the header without issues. The hardest part was deciding what pictures to use!
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