Tech Tip: Add the Weather to Your Sidebar

This week I added a weather widget to the sidebar of my blog.  Knowing the weather is useful.  I tried to find one from weather.gov (a website by NOAA) but was unable to find one.  I chose to use the one recommended in the tech tip assignment.

Wikimedia Commons

Review - Week 8

This week I chose an image from Monday, March 7th blog post.

Punctuation Matters

I chose this image because I have seen this letter before.  I talked about this in late middle school or early high school.  I remember sitting in English class reading this. It is kinda neat to see, since all of the words are exactly the same .

Growth Mindset : Growth Mindset Memes - Make your own - Week 8

The author of this quote is unknown.  I chose to use automotivator in order to make this meme using this image from Pixabay.
Since Laura's growth mindset memes all have cats, I decided to stick with this theme.

Reading Plan

Native American Folklore - Little People

Here is my reading plan for the remaining readings in the class.

Week 9: Alaska - I have learned some about native American culture, but I know very little about Alaskan culture.  I am curious to see what these stories are like.  This tale was chosen based on the stories region.

Week 10: Myths of Cherokee - This story caught my eye because the description talks about origin stories of the moon, the stars and the sky. Part of what I liked about Greek mythology is that the physics of the word and how things works is all explained away by gods.  I am curious to see where the Cherokee think the world came from.

Week 11: King Arthur - I know we only had to plan for week 9 and 10, however since this story works well with my storybook I will go ahead and list it.  I may go and do the week 11 assignment over spring break for more inspiration for my storybook.

Other tales that look interesting to me include the following:

Celtic Tales
Faerie Queene
Hunt

Blog Ideas

This week I looked at other people's blogs to get some ideas for my own.  Here are the three blogs that I liked any what parts of them captures my attention.

Color Wheel

1. Mythology & Folklore - I chose this blog for the color theme.  Everything about this blog was slightly purple.  The background for the text was a very light purple, and then blog background was a purple image, and even the heading where purple.  This game the blog a very uniform theme.  It was not however distracting and the text was still easy to read.
2. Ali's Mythology and Folklore Blog -I chose this blog because I love the background images.  The birds on either side are symmetric.  The whole blog has a very soft and welcoming feeling.
3. Alexandra's Myths - This is one of the other blogs that uses widgets.  Alexandra added a weather widget to the side of her blog.  This is something that I plan to add to my blog in the future, maybe as this week's tech tip. 

Overall I think most of the blogs I've seen have nice designs.  The style of design does not matter a whole lot to me, since there are many acceptable choices.  My only complaint or comment to other people is that occasionally text will be really hard to read.  It doesn't matter how cool your blog looks, but if the text is not readable then nobody is going to want to stay at your blog.

Although I liked the blogs I sited above, they work well for a different person's personality.  I put thought and effort into the look of my blog initially, so there really isn't anything I want to change about it.  I will add a weather widget to the side and use that as one of my tech tips. 

Time Management

My goal for this class was to stay ahead so that I can finish early.  By doing at least 10 points of extra credit every week, I have managed to get 293 / 450 of my total points.  I plan to continue working at this pace.  If I do all of my assignments plus 10 points of extra credit the here is how many point I will have at the end of the following three weeks:
Week 8 : 333
Week 9 : 373
Week 10 : 413

My Schedule:

• Monday: Reading 1 - 1 hr
• Tuesday: Reading 2 - 1 hr
• Wednesday: Story Writing - 1 hr
• Friday:  Blog comments +  Extra credit blog comments + Project Feedback - 2 hr
• Sunday: Project + Learning challenge + tech tip + review - 3hr

I knew going into this class that my 2 graduate classes would take up a significant amount of my time.  I want to really be able to dedicate more of my attention to these classes for the last 5 weeks of school. My time management plan is to get done with this class first, since it is the most predictable, assignments are posted ahead of time, and I can make good estimates. It is much harder to estimate how long a programming project will take, which makes it more difficult to practice good time management skills.

Yesterday's Junk