When I read Joshua Romero’s “How I learned to live Google-free”
I realized there were several aspects about keeping a blog. First who do you want to read your blog and second
how much information do you really want to post about yourself for others to
read. Everything that you post is
accessible to not only your friends, but the data collecting of Google, and
anyone else that might be able to see your blog. You might want to think twice about posting
personal things into a blog that anyone could read, or choose to restrict your
blog to only those you have a personal relationship with. Reading
further into the Joshua’s blog he talks about using search engines and other
Google services and leaving a digital trail.
Digital trails say a lot about you to the data aggregators who use the
digital trails to personalize ad’s for your viewing. Joshua talks about how the ad’s that he receives
shows that his digital trail is not accurate. Joshua also discusses the process
he goes through to reduce the services that he personally uses to reduce his digital
trail.
In Feross Aboukhadiejeh’s “How I learned to program
computers”, he starts off by discussing
the type of people that program well and the process that they use to achieve
their level of skill. Feross then goes into his own progression on becoming a
computer programmer starting off by his building a website in HTML, then
improving his website to make it dynamic by programming his web pages in PHP.
Joshua improved on his PHP skills by building a second website in PHP and a
system called Joomia, he also made a website for his school’s Key Club. Joshua talks about learning from reading blog’s
by first-class designers and programmers of which he gives some links. Joshua
finishes up with his a step-by-step advice to learning programming.
Between the two narratives I learned some things that I
can use in my own blog. First I want to
minimize the digital trail that I leave by restricting what personal
information I post and restricting access to my blog to only those that I feel
actually need to see it. The second thing is that to produce a blog that people
enjoy and want to read is going to take practice, experimentation, and making
ample use of resources available on the internet. Google Blogger has basic templates to use so
I will pick one of those to start off then I will spice it up with my own
pictures and arrangements. Then I will review other peoples blogs to find ideas that I might be able to use and/or improve upon and personalize to my own tastes.
