Tag Archives: Online Self

Mini Assignment 5: Create an Infographic

Infographic summarizing Spilling the Royaltea's online self (described below)

This infographic summarizes the most important aspects related to Spilling the Royaltea. These include the site’s tagline, navigation, community guidelines, and goals. At the beginning of the semester, I created a diagram explaining the site’s navigation, but a lot has changed since then. Therefore, using this infographic, I was able to reflect on these changes and create a more representative navigation scheme showing where I am now. In creating this infographic, I also reflected on some of the community guidelines I would like to enforce on my site, including respect, tolerance, openness, and connectedness. Finally, I set out three goals for my site, which includes the more measurable, numerical goal of posting 2-3 times each week, and the more ideological goals of challenging readers and fostering open conversation.

Reference:

Wong, O. (2023, January 28). Blog design part 2: Mapping it out. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/blog-design-part-2-mapping-it-out/

Mini Assignment #5: Create an infographic that summarizes your online self

Digital-IdenTITYDownload

For week 5’s mini assignment, we were asked to summarize our online selves by using an infographic. I searched how to make an infographic and canva came up. Canva is really proving to be one handy tool when creating imagery for my website. I had a lot of fun creating the infographic and chose a gardening tip theme and just remixed it with garden and publication jargon. I called it “7 easy ways to grow a digital identity.” I threw in what I wanted my online self to come across as in Little Feather Adventures. In the infographic, I included my love for the outdoors, adventuring, gardening, animals, and photography. I also wanted my true self to come out within some of my humour as part of my online self.

Essay 2: Not the end!

Last April, I have created my first website with Wix.com. It serves as a portfolio to showcase my photography work to others, especially to the employers when I am applying for jobs. I did not intend to write and post other content on the website because I feel self-conscious when people read what I wrote.

I haven’t updated the website for months as I was too busy at school. But when I receive my acceptance letter as an exchange student in SFU, I thought it’ll be a great opportunity to reactivate my website to post so I can document my journey in Canada. I am glad that I took PUB101, which “forces” me to post on a regular basis. It was frustrating at first when we have so much freedom in this course and I was still adjusting to the new learning environment here, jet lag and everything. I remember I couldn’t think of a name for my domain until I was unpacking my clothes from my luggage, then I realised how many stripes clothes I have. That’s how lilyinstripes was born.

It took me a whole night to complete the setup of the blog, from purchasing the domain and picking the theme that best matches my content. As these 12 weeks progresses, I am proud of the content I created and the positive feedbacks that I received from peers and friends from around the world.  It has resulted in a reduction in bounce rate to 61.67% and an increase in session duration to 2 minutes 13 seconds compared to the last 30 days. Google Analytics is by far one of the most useful and important tools that I’ve mastered in this course. The analytics provides me with insights to create intriguing content that will allow users to stay longer on my blog.

According to Patel (2019), bounce rate refers to the “bounce” that someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. As of the statistics by Google Benchmarks 2017, the bounce rate in the arts & entertainment industry is 58.69% (Ritwick, 2018), which is three per cent below mine. I will continue to post when the semester ends, aiming to reach through this three per cent difference by including more engaging content. When I look at the pages that my users most frequently visit, I notice that more people visit the photography page rather than the portfolio page. I think they may have expected to see more of my photography work under “photography” while I put them under “portfolio”. To avoid confusion, I will remove the photography category and use portfolio instead, so people can easily access to my photos.

When I started my first blog, I asked myself “How should I differ from other travel or photography blogs?” I knew exchange or studying abroad may seem interesting to my audiences, so I thought it’ll be a good idea to share Hong Kong culture to my Canadian friends and also allow my family and friends in Hong Kong to know what I’ve been up to in Canada. Tobi Cheung, one of the classmates who did a peer review on my blog said the Cantonese characters and pronunciations in each blog posts adds a personal touch and connection to my audience (Cheung, 2019)[, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve. Even though Cantonese is not a very common language to most Westerners, I hope to connect with my audiences by showing Hong Kong’s language so my users can understand my background and the place where I grow up in better. I see language as a way to connect with others. I realise most Westerners cannot tell the difference between Hong Kong and China (that’s the most frequently asked question by Uber and taxi drivers), we share similar language, similar characters but they are not the SAME. Therefore, I’ve decided to always include a Chinese keyword in traditional Chinese characters and its Cantonese pronunciation, so it tells more about what’s special about Hong Kong. As Adam wrote in the peer review, “One of humanity’s defining features is its ability to communicate with language.” (Schmidt, 2019). I hope my audience can get an overview and know more about Cantonese and Hong Kong culture when they read through my blog posts.

Looking back at the blog posts I’ve written, I realized how much I’ve grown and experienced in the past couple of months. First time blogging, first time studying abroad, first time skiing, first time seeing aurora and of course, my first solo trips. I am glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and experienced so many new things here! I will keep on posting when the semester finishes. I will be doing lots of travelling before I head back to Hong Kong, hopefully, there’ll be more photos coming up! Also, stay tuned to my blog if you’re interested in my life in Hong Kong! The support from all of you is the greatest motivation to keep my blog running.

This is by far the most rewarding class I’ve taken in university. Thank you all for making the first half of 2019 extra special and memorable!

References:



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Week 9: My Infographic

I had very little experience with creating infographics. I’m not capable of making one from scratch so I opted for the free ones! Thankfully, I’ve used Piktochart to create mine and it’s very simple. With free software (and limited knowledge of the software), I came up with a very simple one.

my desktop screen

I wasn’t comfortable showing who I am online because I still have this unfamiliarity with blogs. So, I focused on my own online activities and how that represents me.

Discord and Reddit are big time spenders I have online. I like to be on Reddit because I can browse for news and find updates on topics that I follow. I don’t usually engage because I’m content with reading. I occasionally comment, but I prefer to stay anonymous. I use Discord because a few of my close friends are on there, and it’s an easy way to communicate when we play games online. These 2 are part of my online self. I am active in my own circles, but curious in others.

Instagram is the closest platform for me that represents my ideal online. I also want to create content that’s eye catching and interesting. I do have pieces of my personal life on there, but I try to keep it vague. I use it the most often because it’s a good aggregation of content that I want to see (especially the many dog accounts). All this combined represents who I am online, and I kept the theme neutral to focus on these aspects.