For my digital project I currently have two blog posts up, My goal is to get 3 more up before the end of the semester. I am still working on building community on my blog, but I am getting web traffic, just not much interaction like comments or subscriptions. Some of the lack of engagement stems from my various insecurities about widely sharing the project, but the more I write and post, it gets a little easier. I also am working on building up other parts of the website, not just the blog posts. I am still trying to nail down what exactly I want my “brand” to be and how to best represent that on the blog, but I do have several ideas and goals in mind.
For blog post 3 I plan on discussing ChatGPT and how I have used it to help me with python. In this post I will also explore the other resources I’ve been using to help me learn. Learning python has been slightly more difficult than I initially thought, but I’m slowly navigating it the best I can. I feel like this is something I want to continue after the class for sure because at the end of the day, it’s kind of fun.
– Ava
I really like how your project is coming together. I think the theme you picked for your blog looks great. Along with that, I think the voice you have taken in the blog posts is great. I like that you aren’t being overly academic and that you are talking through what you hope to learn in progress over the blog. I think I’ve mentioned this before in class, but some of what you are doing with this reminds me of the way that the team behind The Data Sitters Club has been approaching their collaboration (https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/ ). So if you haven’t checked them out it would be great to do so.
It’s great that you are thinking about trying to build more engagement. That said, my experience is that it generally takes a while of building out your content before you are likely to get much engagement. So I think continuing to focus on getting some more good posts up there and sharing out some results of your attempts to use some of the tools will be the main thing to focus on.
So for the remainder of your posts, it would be really great if you could get one in there where you really show something that you are now able to do with Python that has implications for doing historical research. Like if you could walk us through doing one or two of the specific kinds of actions or activities that you’ve seen on the Programing Historian, I think that would make it all al little more concrete too.
In any event, great work and I’m really interested to see what comes together with your last few posts on this.
Best, Trevor
First off, I really love the voice you have for your posts! It’s causal and fun in a way that’s really easy to follow, like you’re just kind of chatting with someone. I also just personally love being able to see someone’s progress trying to learn something, and it being so open and casual makes it feel a lot more approachable than similar process tracking projects and such that I’ve seen before! While I love reading the updates and hearing about your progress, I do think it would also be nice (if possible) to see images/screenshots or something like that of your progress too, so we can see it ourselves alongside reading about it. The reading is fun and engaging, but without a visual component at times I was left wondering what your work actually looked like as you were going about doing it.
Can’t wait to see the other posts, I hope you keep chugging along learning it without any major roadblocks or anything like that! Good luck!