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  • Intro to Video Editing

    Intro to Video Editing

    Well, here we are. After way too long I’ve finished creating my video assignment and captions.

    Here is it: “In Defense of The Tortured Poets Department.” Which, again–objectively a great album. (“Midnights” was so good too. I think Taylor is getting too much flack for her newer albums.)

    Here is the transcription of my video:

    Lexi: “Why ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ by Taylor Swift was my 2024 summer anthem. First of all, it has an absolute banger of an opener, ‘Fortnight,’ and it includes ballads like ‘So Long, London.’”

    [excerpt of “So Long, London” by Taylor Swift begins playing] “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?/I died on the altar waiting for the proof/You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.”

    Lexi: “We can’t forget ‘The Alchemy,’ which gives off the strongest of summer vibes. Yes, there were some skips in there, but those are more than made up for by the others. ‘Tortured Poets’ is perfect for scream-singing in the car, windows down. Which is what I did all summer.”

    The audio I incorporated into the video was the song “So Long, London” by Taylor Swift taken from Spotify. All pictures used were either screenshots from Spotify, grabbed off of Google Images, or pictures I too on my phone.

    I had never used the Canva video editor before, and as someone who grew up on iMovie, I can say that Canva is terrible. Why am I editing a video in a slideshow/pages-of-sorts format? It was so shocking that at first I thought I was in the wrong place.

    I kind of got the hang of it after a bit, but I really didn’t like how I had to cover the entirety of each individual slide instead of just my video taking up the whole screen. If that makes any sense….

    If you’ve never used a video editor before and you don’t need to do anything too complicated, Canva would probably be an easy, user-friendly starting place for video editing.

    I plan to stay away from it for a while, though.

    Once I finally got my video edited, it was time to upload it! Similar to how I’d never used Canva editor before, I’d never uploaded a video to YouTube before (because I’ve never had dreams of being an influencer). It was pretty intuitive, I just walked through the different steps as they were presented to me.

    The only place I got a little tripped up on was captioning. Originally I intended to start with YouTube’s auto-captions and just edit them, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that and I was scared of messing something up. So considering it’s a 40 second video and I don’t talk much, I just decided to type the captions myself from scratch, which was really easy using YouTube’s captioning tools. Hopefully I did an okay job….

    So I finished right? Well, I ran into some issues along the way.

    First, I had a heck of a time embedding the YouTube video. The share link wasn’t working and neither was the HTML embedding code. I was getting some error saying that previewing on other websites had been disabled. Huh?

    Google revealed that somewhere along the way I had managed to disable the embed feature. Zoe did some poking around for me and found the following instructions posted by Some Random Person on the Internet. (Thank you for your service, geverwills from 4 years ago.)

    Instructions posted on an online forum describing how to allow embedding of a YouTube video into another website.
    License settings for a YouTube video. There's a check box that says "Allow embedding" and is now checked as opposed to unchecked.

    When I actually got the video embedded, I ran into another problem. The embedded video wasn’t centered on my website page.

    As Katy accidentally captured on film, the world was against me for some reason. Someone didn’t want my video out there. What had I stumbled upon that was so ground breaking that my computer wanted to prevent me from telling the world??

    I know nothing about coding, HTML or otherwise, so Zoe once again jumped in as my rescuer.

    After some Googling, some ChatGPTing, and some trial and error, Zoe was able to figure out what was wrong with the code: something about creating a container for the style command to restrict the centering to the actual video container. I don’t know. Again, I haven’t a clue how HTML code works.

    Finally, my masterpiece is complete. Please enjoy my foray into the Canva video editor!

  • Second Mock Consultation Reflection

    Second Mock Consultation Reflection

    I have to start this out by saying that it was absolutely brutal to watch half an hour of footage of myself giving a consultation.

    Now onto the reflection!

    The part of the consultation that I felt most confident in was establishing the subdomain. This is because I was able to practice that skill in my first consultation, so it was fresher in my memory. I got a little tripped up on pro themes, but I asked my fellow consultants for help and Katy gave a great explaination.

    By far the trickiest part of the consultation was trying to add a social media button that would lead directly to May Day’s LinkedIn. Since I’m not using my website in a strictly professional manner and I don’t have any social media, I hadn’t even considered how one might link their social media to their website.

    After I had her aimlessly click around for a while, May Day took pity on me and discovered the social media button. Even then, I couldn’t figure out how to link it. Oh well. Zoe helped show me afterward, so hopefully I can do it next time.

    Another tricky part was figuring out the best way to put May Day’s resume on the website. I think the way I had her do it is wrong. In the future, I believe the best way to link a resume is by inserting a PDF file? (Feli or Zoe correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.)

    As for how I went about figuring out the student’s needs, I had May Day pull up the assignment so I could read it myself. I also just let her talk while I listened to what she was highlighting as important for the assignment.

    From this experience, I learned that my consulting style right now is “let’s figure this out together.” I would like to say it’s because I want to empower my clients to become more tech savvy, but it’s really because I don’t know much about WordPress or the troubleshooting of it.

    Next time, I will try to cut down on the aimless clicking around to figure stuff out. I will do this by asking my coworkers for advice, using the DKC guides (both online and printed), and not being afraid to Google things.

    Maybe I can also use my own computer more and see what happens on my website for various things?

  • Sites@UMW

    I created my own sites@umw. Here is the link to My Sample Site. I chose to theme the website as if it were just an example to be used to model sites@umw to someone who doesn’t know what it is.

    I would explain the difference between sites@umw and domain of one’s own as such: sites@umw is a much simpler way to web build. If DoOO is a plot of land, than sites@umw is renting an apartment. The URL is connected to UMW, but you can utilize it for (almost) whatever you want.

    Sites@umw has less freedom when it comes to themes and customization, but it’s a little more user-friendly and intuitive than DoOO.

  • Bad web design

    Here is an example post of inaccessible, bad web design. My first example, which you may not have picked up on if you don’t use a screenreader, is that I have an empty text box. I also don’t have a properly formatted title.

    Second of all, I’m not listing these examples in a list.

    What about this picture I have here? There’s no alt text, so some will never know what it’s a picture of.

    Click here for more!

    OR

    http://dkctraining.lexigudgel.net

  • Introduction to Accessibility

    I completed the Introduction to Accessibility module! I learned a lot of new things, such as more information about how a screen reader will react to certain features of my website.

    What I believe the difference to be between accommodations and accessibility and this: accessibility means taking simple steps to make something more inclusive for all kinds of people and abilities, such as adding alt texts to pictures. Accommodations, on the other hand, require documentation of some form of disability and necessitate extra help that is outside the realm of what is usually done.

    For example, most college students are not permitted to record a professor’s lecture. Students with an accommodation for ADHD or something similar, however, may be allowed to record lectures to rewatch and review later.

    As a consultant, I anticipate that I may have a client who uses a screen reader. In order to adapt to this, I will have to change the way I describe what to do. (I’ll have to come up with something more helpful than “click on the blue button up top.”)

    In the work that I do, I have to consider how my attitude and language affects those with disabilities. This means taking the time to prepare for consultations ahead of time if I see they request an accommodation. This also means making sure I don’t place all of the responsibility on my client to know exactly all of the additional help they need, and being open and willing to give that extra assistance.

    After the training, I went through and added alt text to all of my pictures on my main domain and subdomains. I also installed the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker plugin.

    Something that I didn’t know to watch out for is that sometimes I would have an empty paragraph block. When viewing it on the website, it just looks like empty space, but the accessibility checker pointed out that a screen reader would read it as a paragraph and it might confuse the person using that screen reader.

    There were a few accessibility issues that my theme made it impossible for me to change. To name a couple of these issues:

    1. The name of commenters as well as the date of my blog posts are in a grey color that is too similar to the white background to pass the accessibility test for easy readability. I was unable to find a way to change this.
    2. On my main page, my latest blog post shows up in picture form with a box in the middle that says “read more.” Because of the way it’s set up, a screen reader wouldn’t read the blog post excerpt, just the “read more” button. This could be very confusing to people. I tried to change the display, but I already had the home page set to static and didn’t see any other options to change the set up.

  • The Building Continues…

    It only took me an hour, but I was finally able to customize my plugin to my liking.

    For the sidebars, all I really did was delete the phrases I didn’t want/need (FAQ, shopping, events, etc.) because there wasn’t much else to customize.

    For the plugin, I chose WPB Accordions because I didn’t like the display of my menu buttons. I was going for a hamburger menu look such as on my main domain, but I’m also happy with the dropdown menu look. I might try to customer the buttons more later on.

    Next, I scrolled through the different appointment types offered by the DKC. There were three that caught my eye as ones I’m most excited to learn about:

    1. HCC Production Studio Training
    2. Cricut Training
    3. Podcast Studio Training

    I’m super interested in developing my video and audio recording/editing skills, which is why I’m looking forward to the studio training sessions. However, I’m also hyped up for the Cricut training so that I can start making my own stickers and other designs!

  • I Survived My First Mock Consultation!

    I Survived My First Mock Consultation!

    The heading says it all! I had my first mock consultation today with Mayday (played by Zoe). I had forgotten most of what was asked of me (oops), but by utilizing the DKC guides as well as asking my fellow consultants, I was able to help Mayday set up a Doman of One’s Own account!

    Feeling: victorious.

    3D printed miniature trophy reading "I Survived My First Mock Consultation"

  • Linked my subdomain to my main domain!

    After establishing my DKC training subdomain, I was focusing mainly on sprucing up my main domain. Now that I’m happy with the way my main homepage looks, I can work on my DKC training page, which is what I was tasked with doing in the first place.

    So I figured out how to make a widget and hyperlink for my subdomain, and now they’re connected! And here is my subsequent first blog post.

    Yay!

    Be on the lookout for more blog posts on both my main domain and DKC training subdomain.