Efficiency

Creative Commons

Michelle Prizzi Blog, Creative Commons, WordPress , , , 0 Comment

Our research is free for anyone to use. However, we wanted a clear way to express this. Creative Commons is a nonprofit that licenses your research and pictures. When choosing which license, I chose attribution. Put simply, anyone can use our research as long as they give us credit.

Creative Commons does an excellent job of making their site user friendly. The process was simple and easy. I clicked the “Share your work” tab at the top, and filled out the questionnaire. When I was finished they gave me code and told me to post it on our site. At first, I put this on our homepage However, it just looked like code. After a little more trial and error, I put it in the “text” option in the footer of our site. After I did this, the code became a clickable Creative Commons link. Overall, I am very impressed with Creative Commons and highly recommend them for anyone who is trying to license their work.

The Best and Worst Functions of WordPress

Michelle Prizzi Blog, WordPress , , 2 Comments

In my opinion, the best function of WordPress is the edit shortcut when you visit your site. This is extremely helpful in the final stages of production because you can view your site, catch a typo or another minor problem, and hit edit. This takes you back to that page or post on that dashboard. It eliminates several steps that you would have to do without this shortcut making editing fast and easy.

edit

The worst function of WordPress is not being able to save a draft of a page. Being a student, I would work on the blog at odd times, sometimes in between classes. Even though a page I was working on was not ready to be viewed by the public, I would have to Publish it just to save my progress. I am a bit of a perfectionist so I found this frustrating to Publish and incomplete version.

publish

Choosing a Blog Theme

Michelle Prizzi Blog, WordPress , , , 0 Comment

Personally, I think my biggest obstacle with creating the blog was choosing a theme. WordPress has many options, so finding a theme wasn’t the problem, finding one that had all the capabilities I wanted was. The first theme I picked which I really liked was called “Vertex”. But there were a few features that I wasn’t thrilled about. First, it took the secondary title “A TLTC Blog” and made it look like button. However, if you clicked on it nothing happened. This was a bit misleading for our viewers. This button was also in the center of our blog page and there was no way to move it, edit it, or delete it.

The second problem with this theme was that it didn’t have an option for a header image. When I first picked this theme, I thought that blank space at the top included the header image but it didn’t.

Here is an example of the blog that I didn't like. As you can see, the red bar looks like a button and I couldn't change the image of the clouds.
Here is an example of the blog that I didn’t like. As you can see, the red bar looks like a button and I couldn’t change the image of the clouds.

After some search, I found “Accelerate blog theme to be clean and user friendly. I was also with the rest of the research team when I chose the theme so it was nice to have their thoughts as well.

Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets: Which One Did We Choose?

Anastasia Bushey Coding, Data, Google Drive, Microsoft Excel, Organization, Project , , , , 0 Comment

Initially, we were going to use Google’s spreadsheet because we could all edit it in one place, but we encountered a few problems. Some of the data in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet when opened in the Google spreadsheet would overlap into other columns, making it hard to read. Additionally, there would be the occasion where data that was present in the Excel sheet was missing in Google’s spreadsheet. As another point, we all had the same version (2013) of Microsoft Excel  pre-downloaded on our laptops which made Microsoft Excel compatibility easy. It was unanimously decided that we use Microsoft Excel to input data. However, we also decided to use Google Drive to save and share our data on a cloud. Google Drive also updated us via email anytime one of us contributed to our shared folder.

We created three folders in google docs to organize our saved spreadsheets and other files. These three were ‘1st DH Raw Data’, ‘2nd DH Raw Data’, and ‘DH Meeting Docs’. The third folder held our meeting minutes, or what our discussions were when we met and what goals we discussed to have done before we next met. Both the first and second raw data folders had sub folders of ‘checked’ and ‘unchecked’, where the previously naming convention came in handy. Additionally, both raw data set folders had their respective index card scanned copies were saved there. In doing this, we kept all files organized well and were able to share files efficiently. Although we all saved the most recent files to our desktops and to a shared USB drive for backup, Google Drive assured that our updated and previous files were in one place that we could all access from any computer.