Writing In & For Digital Environments

The blog I hope to create will cater to the “manliness” design of blogs found on sites like Supercompressor and Por Homme, while also incorporating topics such as sports and popular political/social issues found on sites such as Bleacher Report, SB Nation, and Barstool Sports.

I chose the title “ForManByMan” because I feel as though it has an aesthetic similar to both Supercompressor and Por Home that depicts a sense of modernity; given that my blog will cater to the tastes of the younger male demographic, having a title that represents their tastes is crucial to the success of my blog.

In addition, this manliness/modernity will be conveyed through the layout and design of my blog. My blog will aim to create a user experience similar to that of Supercompressor, with large headings/pictures at the top of the page followed by smaller pictures with subsequent headings with a page that is continuously scrolling. 

Bleacher Report also employs a technique similar to Supercompressor on their site. However, the initial picture/heading displaying the leading story is much larger than the subsequent picture/heading of the other less relevant/older posts.

In addition to employing display techniques that cater to the younger male demographic, my blog will also use a voice that men of this demographic can relate to. The inspiration for this voice comes from the satirical humor employed by writers for Barstool Sports. Their humor, although often crude and offensive, is what many readers of this demographic find humorous/ interesting, and is what builds the great online community that Barstool has. The sense of community found on the site (in terms of the amount of conversations that occur in the comments section) far surpasses any of the other sites previously mentioned, and is something my blog will aim to accomplish.

Few years ago, I watched a movie that actually impressed me in different ways: “Julie/Julia”.

Julie & Julia (2009)

While working for a Corporation in August 2002, Julia Powell began the “Julie/Julia Project”, a blog in which she attempts to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. Quickly this blog gained a large success, and Julia, later, signed a book deal. The book, “Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen”, was published in 2005. Few years later, the movie adaptation followed.

“Julie Powell wanted to be a writer after all. She started the so called “Julie/Julia Project” blog to write about what she truly loves – cooking ”. Starting writing about what you really like: there’s no better way to begin. 

So, why am I talking about this now? Because, as lots of people did in the past 13 years, I also would like to use Julie’s example to both improve my writing skills and, most important, to have fun by sharing what I know (and having fun).

Cooking is, also, something that connects people all over the world, no matter your race, gender, religion, and diversities. Gisela, a Mexican chef, started her “Julie/Julia/Gisela Project” to share her experience as a chef in Korea. Lawrence, instead, used Julie’s experience to make his own challenge: “Julie Powell managed to cook her way through all 524 recipes in Child’s cookbook in a year, learning valuable life lessons along the way. I hope to learn as much, if not more, by watching the film Julie & Julia every day for a year”. Jana, on the contrary, used a different approach. She was “taking on a similar challenge [- Julie’s], only [she is] blogging [her] way through a very healthy cookbook! And [she] will learn to master the art of healthy cooking! The book is called Eat For Health by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. [she] will cook every recipe start to finish in four weeks just as they are laid out in the book. [She] will write about the recipes, show pictures, and tell how [her] SAD (Standard American Diet) eating, carnivorous husband likes them too”. 

Interestingly, everyone found in “Julie/Julia Project” a way to express his/her self in a unique way, so I, also, would like to be part of this used-to-be mainstream universe by adding my own original point of view: cooking Italian(-ish) dishes found in Child and Powell’s books with my Italian students, one recipe per month for one year.

I’ve always had an aversion to overly-personal blogs. Reading about someone’s life in such an intimate fashion online has always made me cringe. Yet I don’t mind the same intimacy when reading biographies or op-eds published through news sites. For some reason, the source seems to be important in determining my level of discomfort with the writing. In an attempt to curb my unfair and unsubstantiated feelings about writing about oneself, I am interested in writing an extremely personal blog about myself and others. I want to explore the relationships in my life. These include my relationships with my friends, my family, important likes and dislikes in my life (rap music, pop-country for example), and work relationships.

I don’t intend to open my heart up online. Some things need to remain out of the public eye. I will, however, seek to be honest as possible about my relationships. This will be difficult because I can’t control who reads what I write, and I imagine, given my humor, that I will most likely offend someone, if only in the short term. Furthermore, I will have to tread a fine line between being honest and being respectful to others’ feelings. I can’t promise I’ll nail it, but I’ll give it a shot.

In terms of style, I will be aiming to write like many of the contributors on Passion of the Weiss. A perfect example of that writing style can be seen on this week’s Rap Up or on the recent review of Travis Scott’s newest album. The writers for Passion of the Weiss employ a colloquial-intellectual style that appeals to Millennial taste while still retaining an air of journalistic integrity. It reminds me vaguely of Kurt Vonnegut.

Passion of the Weiss hand drawn portrait. http://www.passionweiss.com/2015/09/21/dam-funk-invite-the-light-album-review-stones-throw/

My love affair with Passion of the Weiss ends there. The layout of the site doesn’t appeal to me. The all-black background has its purpose, but it seems immature to me in some way. I do, however, enjoy the hand-drawn portraits that appear in many of the articles, and would consider employing a similar style in that respect. In terms of layout, I much prefer FiveThirtyEight. Although I could not populate my blog with nearly the amount of content that FiveThirtyEight can, I like the column-and-box layout and the white background. I’ll attempt to design my own blog in that manner.

So, yeah…That’s how I plan to start my blog. I hope you read it. Unless I’m writing about you. Things could get weird.

These past few weeks have been the first time in my life that I have been exposed to blogging. I have never had an interest in writing blogs or even really looking at them. Well that has now changed…

For my own blog, I plan to write about the active lifestyle I live each day. I play lacrosse here at Dickinson and have always loved all sports. Growing up, I never owned an Xbox or a PlayStation, I instead just played whatever sport or did whatever activity I wanted to. Now a college student, living that easy, do-whatever-you-want lifestyle is a little more challenging but I still try my best each day to find a time to go out and do something.

I do not exactly know how my blog is going to shape up but I envision it being pretty random with keeping the active lifestyle idea consistent. When I was searching for other blogs like mine, I did not really find one that I liked at all. For example, my blog will not be like this one I found called Girls Gone Strong (or at least I hope not). This one is all about womens health and fitness which I am not interested in blogging about at all. Other blogs like this one called Born Fitness covers all aspects of fitness but has its own huge section on recipes. I most certainly will not be writing about any recipes because I do not know the first thing about cooking. My cooking expertise stops at making Easy Mac in the microwave..

My main motivation for writing a blog about living an active lifestyle came from a new brand of compression shorts a family friend created. The brand is called WOLAco which stands for “Way of Life Athletic”. Their compression shorts are absolutely fabulous but right now, it is the brand name I am interested in. WOLAco sparked the idea that I do live an active lifestyle everyday and it is something I can easily blog about.

http://www.bornfitness.com/category/recipes/

https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/

http://www.wola-co.com/

Being a prospective English major with an interest in literature, I wish to write my blog on what is happening in the literary world. I have a lot of interesting ideas about where I could take this blog. The first things that come to mind are book reviews. It could also be interesting to cover literary “news” about new books that are coming out or looking at what popular authors are working on etc. I would even think about doing a close reading of a poem or two, as I have thoroughly enjoyed picking apart the poems we have read in my English 220 class and I believe that by sharing the experience of really digging deep into a poem I can give them similar experiences to ones that I have had. Basically, my blog would be similar to Page Turner, the New Yorker’s literature blog in content.

In terms of design and layout, I plan to have my blog take after other successful literary blogs like The Millions and the Paris Review Daily. I find the layouts of both of these blogs to be very appealing, with their high contrast design stemming from bright colors imposed on a white background. I also want my blog posts to be presented ‘loud and proud’ on the front page of my blog, that is, large and colorful pictures heading the beginning of the post, unlike some other literary blogs which just put plain titles and text seemingly scattered all over the page. I would also think about using an unorthodox font for the titles of my posts in order to make them stand out to the reader.

While the idea of a ‘literary review’ blog is certainly not a new one, I think I can add my own spin on the idea and make something that is  both interesting and entirely my own.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/

http://www.themillions.com

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner

What I want of my blog, and what I want for my blog are not precisely the same. However, both will come about from the blog’s content and aim. I want to write a blog about something very near and dear to me, the being multi-racial. To be just a bit more specific, my blog will be largely focused on the topic, biracial.

So there are a few ways in which I could steer the direction of this blog then. First, let me say that the idea direction of my blog is not entirely my own. During my junior and senior years at Taylor Allderdice High School, Pittsburgh, PA, my friend Avi and I wanted a hashtag on twitter that would encompass any and all challenges or difficulties that came with a biracial background. Avi is half white, half black; I am half white, half Chinese. So although our backgrounds do not line up exactly, they point was the mix itself. So we made the hashtag, “#mixedkidproblems”.

Compelling as that story may or may not be, it is only the seed from which my idea has gone. It may also become the permanent title for my blog. But, rather than an entire blog complaining and whining about standing out, what I would like to do is make a space in which I can share my story and the stories of others who have been asked: “so where do you actually come from?” “how do you get your hair like that?” “are you actually [ethnicity]?”.

I’ll be mixing the writing with music from some famous “mixed” artists I like. I’ll also have some videos or photography related to being mixed.

I am not the first person to grab hold of this important topic. Here are a couple  blogs I’ve found where the author takes their own spin of the idea of ‘being mixed’.

Multiracial Asian Families: http://multiasianfamilies.blogspot.com/

Mixed Race Families: http://mixedracefamilies.blogspot.com/

One of my first ideas for a blog this semester is doing a weekly update on my golden retriever, Ellie. I got the idea from my mother who frequently sends me pictures, videos and stories of all the crazy things Ellie gets into on a weekly basis. On Sundays when I usually call or FaceTime with my family, she can hear my voice but doesn’t understand where it is coming from. My mother has filmed this and it makes for a hilarious 30-second clip. Also, I follow several Instagram accounts of golden retrievers in which my sister and I daily tag each other in posts. This sparked my inspiration to log all of the stories, pictures and videos that I have or that are sent to me. Just by searching the Internet, the blog that struck me as the most successful was The Daily Golden . This blog was extremely interactive in terms of the several different categories on the sidebar. Also, each post had some sort of picture or video that was so inviting to watch. There is a captivating title then, the graphic or YouTube video following ending with links to the original page and sharable options. One of the most intriguing things about this blog is the Live Twitter feed occurring on the sidebar of the page. If I were to do this topic as my blog, I would set it up so that there would be categories of things she does. For example, she is a chowhound and will do whatever it takes to get food therefore, one of the “categories” could be labeled chowhound. Since, I have videos of her and frequently get sent them this would make the blog multimodal. This Tumblr http://goldenretrieverworld.tumblr.com/ account gives a combination of videos and pictures. It is set up similar to Instagram in which each post is laid out in a table of 3 columns and several rows. For my blog, I would use a similar design however; I would incorporate a captivating headline above the photo.

The Daily Golden

            Another idea I have for a blog is to document the balance between a rigorous liberal arts academic schedule and a Division III Collegiate sport (aka Lacrosse). What sparked my interest in doing this topic was my coach. When I came in for the weekly captains meeting she had suggested doing this topic since I am biology major and a three-year captain. I have endured many of the struggles that athletes face every day from time management, to finding time for yourself and to keeping your grades up. Although managing academics has been under different circumstances for me ever since I was a freshman. Every Tuesday during the season of my freshman year, I would have to leave practice an hour earlier in order to make my General Chemistry lab at 6:00PM. I requested to be in this lab strictly for the fact that the other sections were during the afternoons where I had games. I had had a different coach then but she was more than accommodating in that her philosophy was that you would never miss a class or lab for practice or a game. Each year, I have had some sort of accommodation for the classes and labs I would be taking. I feel strongly to share this experience so that future Dickinson Women’s Lacrosse players can understand that a balance between academics and lacrosse can be achieved without sacrificing anything in between. This blog Adrln and The Lax Magazine Blog offer great examples of lacrosse blogs because of the uniqueness to each post. However, I would set my blog up a lot differently by having an Instagram style layout in which each picture would be its own post with a headline. That way navigating between posts is simple and doesn’t compromise the layout.

I am extremely interested in creating a running blog! As a varsity cross country and track and field athlete at Dickinson, it is pretty obvious that running is one of my passions. I am so incredibly fortunate to be part of such  fantastic and fast team that creating a blog about my experiences while running at Dickinson feels like a great fit. One of my favorite running blogs that has given me inspiration for my running blog, is called the “Suz Lyfe”. http://suzlyfe.com This blog is written by a gal who used to ride horses at the same barn as me growing up. She does an incredible job of blogging about her fitness, giving people running tips, providing viewers with nutritious recipes, and providing reviews for products, foods, restaurants, and more. In addition, she blogs about her journey with Crohns disease, and how she does not let her disease dictate her life. It is incredibly inspiring to see someone triumph through a chronic illness and touch so many lives. I believe it makes people realize how strong we can be with a positive outlook. The Suz Lyfe inspires me to make a blog because it is such a positive and influential blog not just for running, but for healthy living overall.

taken from “Suz Lyfe”

Another influential running blog is called “Lazy Girl Running”. http://www.lazygirlrunning.com/blog This is an influential blog because it is written by a women who found a love for running later in life and it is now her goal to help other people learn to love running and reach their running goals. She provides workout plans for new runners and encouragement posts for all of her fellow runners and readers overall.taken from “Lazy Girl Running”.

Overall, these two running blogs have given me many ideas as to what I want to include in my running blog. I think it would be really fun to include tips about running and certain healthy running foods. I want to convey to my audience why I love running and how I find it enjoyable to run 5-12 miles a day. In addition, I want to share my experiences that I have with my team and give readers an idea of what it is like to be a cross country runner at Dickinson. It is my goal to write compelling posts, make my audience smile, and hopefully spread my love of running with others.taken from “Quick Meme”

I want to write about the experience that I am living as a student abroad. I would like to include not only funny moments, anecdotes and pictures, but also some feelings that have been arousing and the ones that will arouse. Happiness, confusion, curiosity, fear, anxiety, optimism, and some others. I want to share crucial moments of this trip and also make reference to the people who helped me before coming and who are helping me now, during my scholarship. At first, I thought that picking only one particular situation that my Dickinson experience is giving me would be the best decision. But, last week I figured out that I am learning something new from everybody and everything. That is why I am ready to share just every moment, situation or experience that is building my life here. New places, new people, a new house, a new country, ‘international friends’, classes as a student, Spanish classes as a Teaching Assistant, travels, Skype or FaceTime (maybe this take longer than I expect).

I want to make something compelling, avoiding the blogs, the posts or the ‘old news’ stages that most people experience during a semester or year abroad. I would like to share my experience in a natural way, including my pictures and different illustrations, drawings, videos or quotes that help me to express my feelings.

I really enjoyed reading The English Student. It is one of my favorites for the message, the design and the style.  I also enjoyed reading Flirting with the Globe, Nomadic Matt, and Start Up Quote.  Each of these blogs has something that inspired me and made me think about my ‘life blog’ during my residency in the United States.

http://www.theenglishstudent.com/

http://flirtingwiththeglobe.com/

http://www.nomadicmatt.com/

http://startupquote.com/