#7

October 3, 2013
Creating a CAS blog for 11 IB

Early in September our class teacher suggested creating a blog where everyone could post their CAS reflections so that all of them were easily reviewed. Although I have always been interested in creating websites and forums, this - my personal CAS blog - is my first experience with blogs. Also, our teacher mentioned that he had a similar blog for his previous class that every student could edit, hosted on Blogspot, and since I was not sure whether I was capable of creating a blog with such specific features, I did not apply for it at first. 

I thought rather to leave this job for someone who is studying Computer Science and is more interested and skilled in working with computers. Therefore I was quite surprised when half a month later still nothing was done and decided to give it a try. 

First, of course I had to find a host with multi-editing feature, so that everyone could independently post their reflections. In fact, the web-page I had envisioned had the option to distribute pages so that each student's or month's were displayed separately. Blogspot, as it turned out, was not what I was looking for, and I tried a few different hosts such as Weebly, Moonfruit and Webs, with whom I had worked previously. In the end, however, none of them worked for me, at least not without purchasing Premium membership, except for Wordpress.

If on Moonfruit, for example, I spent quite a lot of time working on page's design only to find out that I could not invite any other author to the site, then I had learnt my lesson on Wordpress. I chose a simple, yet constructive template and instantly checked that multi-editing was indeed possible. I made sure that authors had all the necessary permissions, meaning that they could successfully publish posts without waiting Admin's approval but could not edit other people's posts. As I invented my classmates to join the blog as authors, I established some ground rules or rather requests - to register with their name and surname and to place their posts under the corresponding categories.

All in all, I am satisfied with the outcome, and here is a picture of the web page:

ib2015riga.wordpress.com

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My reflections

Unlike programming which I personally found difficult and probably because of that - rather boring, I really enjoy exploring various forums and web pages and this was not exactly my first attempt to create a website. However, I did not have much experience creating pages with multi-editing features, except for forums hosted on Invisionfree or Proboards, neither of which was what I was looking for now, so had to look for something else. It turned out to be more time consuming that I would have liked due to the fact that I spent hours working on page design on Moonfruit only to find out that it did not have the option to invite other editors for free, but I am satisfied with the result.
The web page I created is not exactly how I imagined it at first, because there are some things that authors have to do before publishing their posts other than writing them. Since I want the information posted on blog to remain easily comprehensible, I asked my classmates to check the correct category and add a tag to their posts, so that any reader could find the desired reflections by browsing either names or months. Most of my classmates have already if not posted their September reflection, then at least joined the blog.
When applying for this activity, one of my main goals was to prove to myself that I was able to create a web page with all the necessary features, and I think I succeeded at that. I had never worked on Wordpress before so it was definitely something new for me as well. From now on I will have to regularly check the website so that everything is under control, and it will be my duty to act if something goes wrong, but that is just another small challenge I am keen to undertake.