Working for the Tech Bar is interesting and is teaching me new technologies, like WeVideo and Domains. I am new to my school’s Tech Bar staff and so far am liking it. Many fun, eclectic people work here, which is my kind of crowd.
WeVideo
My first Tech Bar task was to make a WeVideo about myself. One catch: it had to be under 30 seconds.
I am a talkative person. Once you’ve got me going, I might not be able stop, depending on the subject. Some might not believe this as I’m an ambivert with introvert tendencies, but it’s true. Ask any of my clubs.
My first attempt at the video was 42 seconds. I had music in the beginning and end, a title, and two pictures. I talked about a variety of things:
- My major
- Knitting
- Reading
- Writing
- My participation in Graphos, which is the creative journal on campus
- And how I like to stay busy
When I showed it to my supervisors, they said it was a good start and then showed me what more I could do with it:
- Have music go throughout, not just in the beginning and end.
- Include more pictures–show vs tell.
- Play with the heights of sound–WeVideo is cool where you can take a certain clip and increase or decrease the sound level in a super easy way. You can do this for the music or the sound in your main content.
- You can add more levels to layer content over each other.
- Play with it more in general–sound effects, speed, and fades all exist in a user-friendly fashion.
- Also, it has to be exactly 30 seconds–boooo
I took their advice and put in more pictures, picked different music, and shaved off the majority of me talking about staying busy. With the pictures of me with my different clubs, it showed how I liked to stay busy.
Somehow I made it exactly 30 seconds of my content. It actually is 31 seconds, but it’s close enough.
WeVideo is super easy to use, especially for people, like me, who do not have a lot of experience editing videos. Once you play around with it, it’s fairly easy to figure out how to use it.
To be fair, I can typically figure out new technology quickly. When I’m at home or visiting family, I am constantly helping my family figure out whatever their tech issue is. It’s usually something basic like downloading software or clicking a few links.
I am no tech wiz though.
Site Working
For the past few weeks, I have been putting together my blog here and my main site. I have enjoyed tinkering with the themes and figuring out how I want the site to look. I tried on many different themes until I found the one that was perfect for me. I am very particular about outfits–if it’s not comfortable, practical, and fun, I’m not wearing it. The same went for my sites’ outfits.
I’ve had experience with wordpress before because of a class I took called English 305. In English 305, we had to make a portfolio site to showcase what our process of writing was like. My portfolio site only required some basic uploading and customization. We could not play around with themes in case we broke the preloaded content the school downloaded for us.
Such a bummer since there were so many other cool themes.
The Tech Bar also showed me and other Tech Bar students that there are other options than wordpress themes. This entails some coding.
I have had no prior experience to coding. What I’ve seen people code looks like a complicated string of numbers and letters that make no sense. At least, the actors coding on TV make it look super complicated.
Coding actually isn’t too difficult if all you plan on doing is copying and pasting. We did an exercise in a meeting that made it a little less intimidating and involved a dog.
We walked through how to make a subdomain and edit the html folder to customize it. With creating Domains and subdomains, we use Reclaim Hosting. To create a subdomain, you click under subdomains, type in the name you want for it, and hit create. Super simple. Then to edit the html folder, you go back to your cPanel and go to files. From there, you tinker inside the subdomain file.
I don’t currently plan on doing much more with it, but I now at least know the gist of it. Probably.
