The Theme of my web presence was hard to find, as I was not very sure of the theme that I should be doing. The initial theme that I want to do for my web presence is music however, I reckon it is quite hard because I have not done many interview yet with decent musicians that could help my blogs interesting. So finally, after giving a lot of thoughts, I decided to tackle the theme of photography, the other subject that I currently take interest in. it was quite interesting theme for me because I like to take pictures with a Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) and I have quite a lot of collection from my trip and journey of live in Perth.
As this is my first time doing a web presence, I was not sure the website to choose to be my central node, the only website that I know is facebook and flickr, I never touch anything from blogger, myspace, wikipedia, and other websites that eligible to be the central node. However, I think Facebook is going to be a hard for me if I chose facebook to be my central node because it is not as flexible as blogger, as the application does not allow me to link my contributing nodes as simple as blogger. So my quickest and safest choice for my central node is blogger because I think the website is very flexible and allow me to put as many application and web elements as I want. Rebecca Blood once stated in her article that blooger “…places not restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box in which the blogger can type…anything.” (Blood, 2000). So in a way, I can do everything that I want with blogger, including put three of the contributing nodes on the sidebar.
The template that I use is called Watermark template. I chose this template because it was simple and it has nice colour as I was trying to get the calm look for my blog and I like the design with the bird on the upper right of the blog page. I think that watermark template has a nice colour without too much design and decoration. The font that I use for the post is Arial because it think it looks more elegant and beautiful compared to other font types and I also find it very easy to read with a brown background and black coloured font. The Watermark template seems to be the choice for my blog because it brings out the entire headline box and all my contributing nodes box so the reader could easily notice those things. For the picture on top of the blog I chose the picture that I took myself from one of my trip. I like to put this picture up because I think this picture gives a nice colour too and it is in sync with the background colour.
There are five posts total in my blog. It is all the pictures that I took by myself so I have no problem with the copyrights or permission. The format that I chose to do is I have four large pictures, two in the bottom page and two in the upper page, then an extra large picture in the middle. I put them in a zigzag way so I alligned the first picture on the left and the second picture on the right and so on. For each post and pictures, I chose not to babble too much about my picture because I want the reader to be focusing on my pictures instead of reading text in my blog. I also decided to have a simple about me because I have nothing to introduce myself except a basic introduction.
On my sidebar, I put the about me part in the first order then followed by my three contributing nodes which is flicker, twitter, and facebook. The of course, I did not forget to put the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed so the reader could read my blog in their smart phone.
For my three contributing nodes, I chose Flicker, twitter, and facebook. Originally, I wanted to put the link of my youtube channel as my contributing nodes because I think it is a good idea to put a youtube channel and share camera techniques videos as my favourite videos so my blog reader could get the information. However somehow, youtube gadget is broken and I could not put up my youtube channel as I always get the error message from blogger. So I replace youtube to twitter account. On my twitter account, I follow four twitter account that I think relevant to my blog theme which is photography. In my facebook page, I also still instill the theme of my blog, I “like” a few of photography page in the facebook and I uploaded some of my pictures collection. And the last contributing nodes that I chose is flickr, the theme of my blog is photography and flickr is a picture sharing social network so I thought that I had to put flickr as my contributing nodes of course, so in my flickr account, I also uploaded some pictures in my flickr album. In the right side of my blog, all my three contributing nodes are located. And as for the link to my central nodes from the contributing nodes all located in each of the profiling page.
So in conclusion, my web presence is using Blogger website as the central node and as the three contributing nodes, I chose to go with flickr, twitter, and facebook that allows me to express my self as a photography enthusiasts. With the creation of the four nodes and using the technology of web 2.0 tool, I could express my self through a consistent theme across four website.
Reference:
Blood, Rebecca. “Weblogs: A History And Perspective”, Rebecca’s Pocket. 07 September 2000. http://rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
