I've been working on my website for the past two hours, and all I have to show for it is a domain name (giannamay.org, which I am slightly regretting; should've gone with giannamay.net instead), a css file that has yet to be filled, and a headache. I can't exactly seem to figure out how to actually start working on my website (I've been slowly working through the process thanks to a ton of help from Justin Larsen -- definitely glad to have Twitter as a troubleshooting resource), but it is taking far longer than I anticipated. Once I get started, I'm sure, I'll be able to do things at a faster pace, but until then, I think I will have a lot of frustration to deal with in my future.
For one, I don't like to spend too much time on something without feeling like I am making some sort of progress. Staring at a blank screen and jumping between tabs, in this case, does not count. Second, because I'm fairly familiar with different tools to create webpages without use of HTML and CSS such as Wordpress and Google Sites, it is hard to not just take shortcuts and make a webpage the easy way. This is a learning process and I'm eager to figure out how to use these new tools, but sometimes the time it takes from initial startup to actually learning and creating something takes too long for comfort. Further, I always feel as if I am missing a step in the instructions and that somewhere between step 1 and 2, I got lost.
I suppose these frustrations are inevitable. This blog post itself will be the closest thing to a rant post that I am bound to publish (but time and frustration will be the test of that). I guess my greatest frustration at this point is the general start up. Once I actually get the hang of a program, I can generally find my way, but if I have to spend more than an hour just trying to figure out how to begin, it is easy to want to throw in the towel and find something easier to attend to that won't be nearly as time consuming or stubborn.
But I suppose that's why I am in this Digital Humanities course: to be frustrated to some extent. I have been using digital tools for a while, and while my ability with it is still rudimentary, my use of it and its application to my research may have allowed for some sense of complacency without the additional pressure to really try new things. Now that I am required to do so for a class, the feelings of frustration harken back to when I first started to play around with technology. It's been a while since I tried to do something legitimately new. But this frustration and sense of newness is good, as much as my mental state might disagree at the moment. At least it means that I am trying to work through the problems and somewhere over the horizon there is a solution which will result in a greater understanding of HTML and CSS and ultimately will open new opportunities and venues for me to practice digital humanities and apply it to my research and career.
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