DIY trifle revamped

how to make a fast and friendly fresh fruit trifle - More DIY How To Projects

I had already posted about this recipe before, but I decided to revive it and make it into an Instructable for my Future Craft class. Check out the cool illustrations above - thanks, Photoshop! See the rest of the story at my Crafting the Future blog.

how to : tag-specific site feeds

For one of my classes (Future Craft), part of the course is maintaining a blog to post our work and discussions from the course. We have the option to either start a completely new blog or to just create a tag in an existing one.

I had to ask myself: do I want to start another blog that I would use for only one semester and then drop afterwards - thus adding another site to the abandoned internet wasteland? Or, do I want to open up my work and increase traffic to this blog by adding a tag, but then have all my classmates getting mixed up in posts that are clearly unrelated to the course? (The issue of privacy really is moot, since pretty much anything I write online is meant to be read - privacy doesn't quite exist in cyberspace.)

These wonderings lead to my investigation into how one would actually even create a RSS feed for a single blog tag. And yes, it can be done! Blogger's help section isn't terribly conducive to finding this information (and one of their other help articles didn't work), but I did find it here. Essentially what you need to do is insert the following address into the feed reader:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Of course, you need to replace "blogname" with your...blog name, and the "labelname" in the same way. This works beautifully.

With that said...I started another blog. By now, this is the 3rd blog I've started for a specific project (the other two being for the brick masonry vault project - which still lives on - and the SAP Builds blog, which was specific to my January El Salvador trip but might be revived if the group keeps going). Why start another one?

1. I like blogging.
2. It's an experiment: this time around, I'll be starting one on Tumblr, a relatively new blog site launched about 3 years ago. I have blogs on Blogger and Wordpress, but now it's time to see how Tumblr works and if it holds up to the traffic.
3. I'm curious : not only does Tumblr seem to have some cool design templates beyond what's readily available on Wordpress and Blogger (outside of designing my own site completely), but the focus is on microblogging, tumbleblogging, or just short, to the point posts that are sort of something between Twitter and typical blog sites. Sure, the posts will probably still be something at length, but see #2.
4. It's also another experiment in targeted blogging. I discovered through the SAP Builds and Vault blogs that really focused sites are easier to describe to others and sometimes attract more of a "following" than general personal blogs. Of course, this blog here resists the specificity since I'm sort of a generalist, but...yeah go to back to #2. I might just end up mashing them all up together in the end - who knows?

Anyways, it's still in its birthing stages but check it out for updates later (will dual-post as well to give a taste):

crafting the future

The first webinar

One of my tasks at my internship, among loads of other things, was to take on the job of coordinating and moderating (and eventually trouble-shooting) a Green Development Center webcast. Now...I've given plenty of presentations within an academic context, but not many in the professional world, and a total of zero web-based ones. This was new territory, but it's been a cool experience learning in the last couple months about the process of developing one and just researching and getting educated on the topic itself.

I've heard about off-site (or modular) cnstruction a little bit, but just imagined cranes swinging boxes in the air - very cookie cutter building and not very interesting. However, after chatting quite a bit with the panelists, who are all experts in the field, I soon realized that there was a lot more to it. It means that buildings can still be customized, but instead of constructing it directly in the site ("stick building"), it's fabricated in the controlled environment of a factory and then shipped and placed with a crane. The regulated atmosphere doesn't automate the process necessarily (not a conveyor belt, but still people doing the work), but it makes it faster, often cleaner, and more integrated of a process.

This diagram from some UVA students was helpful in illustrating how off-site construction goes from factory to site:

(UVA)

Then...take 2 months' worth of research, conference calls, and ta-da!

The hour and a half went well yesterday, despite some technical hiccups. Wahoo - that's one big project done.

I won't go into length about off-site construction itself, but some of the things I noticed:

• The making of a good Powerpoint is KEY - and I was shocked at how many presentations (not necessarily those of the presenters, but just in general) were just..not...very...good. And they're being shown in very professional settings, so I guess I've taken for granted, being in the design world, how important aesthetics and just plain readability are in getting your point across.

• Off-site construction and other systems-based building techniques aren't taught at all in school. I suppose they border on the building science side of things, which has a weird role in academia. One of the panelists seemed gung-ho about me bringing this back to the classroom realm...but we'll see what happens.

• Coordinating 3 busy people for a slew of conference calls and meetings, across time zones nonetheless, is a little stressful. To say the least. We got through it, though, and I was pleasantly surprised - and grateful - how, despite the many reschedules, these professionals were really flexible and willing to put the effort into this presentation even though it was a voluntary effort.

Technology: love it, hate it, can't live without it.

social media 101

Lately I've become increasingly intrigued by social media. Why do people use them? To what end?

I knew of Facebook from its humble beginnings as a school-exclusive site, so I've seen its development over time. (Fun fact: one of my college classmates actually dated Mark Zuckerberg back in high school.) Now I find myself not understanding Twitter, the new kid on the block - but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it.

As part of my self education, I tuned into an informative webinar hosted by Social Media Magic. It was a pretty straight forward presentation on the basics of social media - why you, too, should get on the bandwagon! The target audience was more for marketers out to build partnerships and a client base, but it was still interesting for me, as I'm hoping to find ways to get projects off the ground in the future.

Some of the more helpful hints:

• Have a specific, narrow message with one core focus. Also known as the "sniper" approach.
  Self assessment: Very difficult for me, since I'm too curious and end up being all over the place in terms of interest. My initial intention was for this blog to be more architecturally focused...but then it ends up also being about food, travel, and other things. Ah well - I guess I'll learn to be a niche maker later.

• Start with the "Big Three" and branch from there.
  Self assessment: Facebook is for friends. LinkedIn is for business connections. Twitter...well, as I said, I'm still trying to figure out why people want to know what someone else ate for dinner. But this leads to the next point...
  

• Twitter can be a powerful search engine like Google.
  Self assessment: Now, this is something I can find value in. Looking at it as a way to search the most current conversations going on all over the world is actually a really smart thing. In my recent marketing/publicity endeavors - the MIT Museum vault project, the Veritas Forum - it's good to search out your audience. Hm hm hm...

So, who uses Twitter? Can you help me shed some light on that?

tag clouding

one of the features i like about wordpress that isn't inherent to blogger is the tag cloud. i know, it's a little silly, but hey - it's nice to have something more visual to communicate information than just lists of links, right? (and i'm a visual person.)

in my initial searches, i found this website that combs through all your posts and creates a very basic, low-res image of a word cloud. i thought it was interesting to see what words i've used the most in my writing:

so you can tell that i seem to like small things and think much of the time about artifex, boston, and good food. hm!

but to create the actual tag cloud widget to the right >>, i found this handy bit of code on this frivolous motion blog. again, it's no frills but does the trick while working with blogger's widgets.