The Secret to Popularity

Blog popularity, that is…

Since my website (aka my web class‘s final project) is finally up (aka due), here’s how I’ve tried to direct traffic there. 

I’ve added it as my website on Facebook, MySpace (even though my last update there was in 2005), and YouTube. I also added a link to my website to my signature on my gmail and American e-mail accounts.

Meanwhile, I revisited the personal portfolio of Cara Williams, and commented one of her blog posts saying how amazing her site it.  It really is. I had linked to her site before as an example of inspirational design, and I still think it is.  The site has a lot going on, but it’s well organized and very informational. I’d like to be able to make something as polished as that and hope to learn from the online community of web developers like her. (Last I checked, the comment wasn’t showing up on her regular site, but was on the blogger feed.)

Plug-ins of the week

Under dynamic web’s complusion, I have this week installed not one, not two, but three plug-in to my website.

I found them all through wordpress.org, but some had their own external sites as well. The first is a shadowbox flickr photo album made by tantannoodle. Wish I was making that up, but I’m not. I liked the simplicity of its thumbnail display (although I’d like to increase the white space between the thumbs), which I hope to emulate manually with thumbnails of my videos, only those will link to…

YouTube videos embedded with Viper’s Video Quicktags. This makes the look of the videos a little more customizable, but mainly makes them simpler to embed behind the scenes.

And finally, for no good reason other than to reflect my pervasive lack of a stable address, I used a contact form called cformsII, which seems to have been developed by a chef. Here, too, I liked that the contact form could take on the very clean, minimalistic look that I want to pervade my site.

Week 4, Assignment 1

Here’s my YouTube site, my Flickr stream, and my Twitter feed.

I think you should watch the Crazy Indian Video Buffalaxed on my YouTube favorites.

This has been another helpful homework assignment for Dynamic Web.