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Personal Website Hack
Due 9 MAR
We’ve already gotten a great jumpstart on this project by submitting your Codecademy badge for completing the Make a Website tutorial, and by spending some time drafting out your ideas for the website using analog technologies :pencil and paper. Before class on Thursday March 9 you will have completed the website, as best you can to this point, and you will, in the class GitHub submit links to your site and to your code repository and, in your Process Journal, a 750-word self-analysis and description of your site. More on both below.
Criteria for Evaluation
In general, all of these will be taken holistically and will be considered in light of your capabilities. The self-analysis will be a place to explain the ways in which the project challenged you. If the project as-such did not challenge you, you might explain what you’ve done to push yourself and your own abilities in the process of hacking, tweaking, and possibly building your site.
The Site Itself
On the “live” side – the site that is public-facing – your site should demonstrate an editorial eye. That is to say that your decisions about template choice and link creation should make a certain amount if implicit sense to the project as a whole. (You’ll have a chance to make those decisions explicit in your self-analysis and description.) Your websites should demonstrate the ability to manipulate the template for your own thematic purposes; they will tell a coherent story – whether that story is about you or your I.S. or your trip to Canton – visually, through your contextualizing writing on the site, and through the links that you create.
The Code Repository
When one looks at your code repository one should find well-structure HTML and CSS. Significant changes that you’ve made to the base (template) code should be documented with comments; you can elaborate on those decisions – the why’s and wherefore’s – in your self-analysis and description. Excellent projects will have wrestled with the relationship between the CSS and the HTML; the ambitious among you may have explored the javascript files as well. Someone coming to your code out of context should know where your template came from (site your sources!) and be able to follow some logic of your decisions.
The Self-Analysis
As you’ve gathered earlier, this is space to make the narrative of your site explicit. What is the story that you set out to tell and how did you have to make decisions along the way to achieve that vision? Additionally, it’s your story of the creation of that site. Where did you find challenges? In what aspects do you take particular pride?
An Introduction to Digital Humanities by Jacob Heil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.