Episode 1: Digital Dungeons and WordPress Woes
So here we are. Ready to start another blogging assignment. These are not especially new to me as much of the coursework for Learning Design (EDCI 335) was conducted through weekly blogs, and inquiry projects. Thom of 5 weeks ago thought “no big deal, I’ll just stay on top of them, they won’t be that challenging”…
Hi! I’m Thom from 5 weeks in the future. I come in peace. The future is a bleak and stressful place. Surprise!
There is a whole story behind the adventure that is/has been setting up my blog, which I think will be a very relatable and useful cautionary tale for future generations. Gather ’round the fire and listen to my story. It has digital dungeons and WordPress woes, as all good stories do…
While setting up my blog for this class I found that I already had a OpenEd website much to my surprise. This website was originally made for a Biology module that I co-created for my Learning Design Class. Rather than creating a new website I decided that I would adapt my previous site. “That will be quick” he said, “that will be easier” he said. He was wrong.
After noodling around on WordPress for a literal eon (don’t fact check me on that), I found that the previous website address was: the-name-of-my-old-partner.opened.ca. For obvious reasons I decided that starting a new website would be the way to go. But rather than using one of the templates available I decided to just make my own. “You’ve already done all the hard work” the technological goblin in my head said. He’s very convincing. So I proceeded to copy all of the content from the old site to the new site. This was done by copying the HTML text from each page and creating new menus on the new site. I then had to go through and copy over all of the media and set up an H5P plugin on this website and import all of my quizzes.
You may note here that I have sunk many hours into this extra work that has no bearing on any course work (of which there was many) that I should actually have been working on.
After about 70 percent of the work was done I came across a nifty little button call “Import Website” which just ports your old site over with almost no work… and that is when I shelved working on the website for a while. That while became a few weeks and now here we are.
Overall there are some valuable lessons that I have learned from this experience. The first is: if you want to really understand how WordPress works then you need to spend far too long getting acquainted with it. Swearing will be involved. That being said I feel a lot more comfortable navigating around the interface after switching themes (which absolutely wrecked the site). Going back and trying to fix the theme really helped me get a good grounding on how to structure all the pages so that they are easily accessible
The second major lesson I learned is that being stubborn and fighting technology is a losing battle. The computer is always going to win. If you are spending far to long on something on a computer, chances are you aren’t the first and there is likely a tool to use to get around that issue.
Hopefully this sob story filled you with pity for my plight. You will notice that there is no media or anything of real interest in this post. This is a strategic move. I have set extremely low expectations so that future posts will marvel my readers with their sheer excellence. They will be none the wiser, for I am undoubtedly devious.