Practicum 8 - Final thoughts

Well, my journey with personal homepages has come to an end. I really appreciate being able to use the coding knowledge I learned back in eighth grade - at least initially. As is per usual in today's society, it's just so much easier to take the more efficient and easier route. I found myself genuinely surprised by things as I worked on the website, which I was not expecting. I was surprised that I was still able to get people to interact with the website and enjoy the content. I was also surprised that I was able to channel some Web 2.0 concepts, such as a participatory culture, into it. I think that is what made it even mildly successful. I was very impressed by the ability Twitter gave me to reach a worldwide audience and I think if anyone is looking to get their website out there quickly and efficiently, a simple status every day on Twitter with key hashtagged words could do wonders. Overall, I am glad to see personal homepages are not completely extinct and I have a new-found respect for them after this project. I think they are still better suited for the "sell yourself" model, but for those amateurs like myself that it would take 10 years to learn the code and templates for a website as fancy as those, this simpler version based around a topic of interest worked just fine.