Reflection on Mission 2: Culture

Looking back at this mission there were various interesting facts I came across. For instance, I was surprised to learn that platforms such as twitter and pinterest are in fact a form of blogging known as microblogging. Originally, in my mind, a blog would have always been mainly a website detailing a persons life and interest, without acknowledging too much that it has developed into much more.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Reading about RSS somewhat resonated with me because I used to be like the average person and bookmark websites I was interested in the hopes of checking for updates but as the favorites list grew I would very rarely come back  to it because the process of checking for updates was tedious. Email subscriptions where a bit more useful, however, my inbox would always be cluttered and that also discouraged me from trying to actually check the notifications. Discovering about rss feeders such as feedly, piqued my interest as now I’m considering installing it on my computer once I’m confident that I know enough about it.

lifewire.com

I found out that wordpress.com and wordpress.org were in fact two different platforms that provided different features to the author.  

kinsta.com

The major difference between them is that with wordpress.org you need to download the free wordpress software which you will use in conjunction with to host your own blog or website. So that’s where the expenditure kicks in. Plugins are another feature I did some exploration about, although I wasn’t able to use them (as they were only accessible using wordpress.org) it was interesting to read about what they are and how they add a layer of depth and analysis to your existing wordpress site.

On the contrary, wordpress.com is self hosted, so you don’t need to worry about back ups and updates. It’s completely free but quite limited in terms of:

• Website customizations
• Cannot install plugins
• You don’t get paid for the ads that appear on your site/blog and you cannot remove them either (unless you pay for one of the premium plans)
• Your blog/site will eventually run out of space and you will need to opt for one of the premium plans when it exceeds 3GB
• The integrated analytics is very limited and you cannot install external custom ones such as google analytics

nature.com

Nonetheless, for a beginner like myself who wanted to experiment with a post or two, it was sufficient. The post where I introduced myself didn’t receive too many views or likes. I’ve come to realize  it was because it was just a post with plain text. Perhaps, I should’ve added more spice to it. Due to it being a blog based on art/illustration, I understood that people wanted to first see what you do before they want to know who you are.

So when I uploaded some pictures of my work with some explanations. It got more likes and views as well as a few follows. 
Unfortunately, our blogs were not successful enough for a significant comparison.

 Despite there being many faults throughout this mission, I can say that it was a good learning experience.