As you may remember this whole site started out as a school project, well that project
is near completion. Here is my reflection paper:
The Abyss Looks In
The objective of my application project was to provide a sort of electronic scrapbook
for my senior year available to all via the world wide web. Belong accomplishes this
amiable goal, but due to an initial uneasiness with the medium it never truly became the
stark realization of myself that I hoped it may have become. Later in the work I focused
on presenting myself in more of a how-I-think way than the
what-I-saw-as-I-traversed-the-days way that is visible in the previous incarnations of
Belong. The ideas over events approach changed how and what I chose to put into the work
and started to offer a deeper presentation of myself; a honest look free of judgments or
censorship.
When I started out on this project the only thing I had going for me was a passing
acquaintance with the internet, ownership of the necessary technology, and persistence. I
was able to befriend several techno-geniuses and from them I learned the basics. After I
had exhausted their knowledge banks or patience I started looking at other’s source
code and from this approach I continued to learn a great deal, however, my web designing
prowess didn’t come into existence until I bought several books on HTML in March. For
four months I had learned almost everything from reverse-engineering other people’s
work, this method of learning taught me to have great patience with the medium and a true
appreciation for what it was capable of doing. When I started working with the books and
FrontPage 98 everything just took off, I learned how to work with Shockwave, Real Audio,
ActiveX, CSS, and all the other buzz words in a matter of days instead of the months it
took me to master the foundation of the Internet.
HTML is an assembly language like basic. It has predefined tags that instruct a browser
how to present any given piece or collection of information. And like basic it has its
demon: the dreaded syntax error. Improper syntax and invalid file names have been the main
difficulty I have had with this project. A single syntax error or wrong file name in a key
location can keep a whole web site from working properly and when that error exists in a
template for creating pages or making additions to pages it can cause hours upon hours of
or exhaustive work to fix. Until I purchased FrontPage 98 I had to make all corrections by
hand, work that could sometimes take days. Also another problem I had was making changes
or additions with large text files; I would sometimes spent days working on putting hot
links in files to make navigation easier or placing new backgrounds into make a happier
aesthetic for the viewer. The only solution I had when I first started this project was
time and patience, but innovation and masterly of HTML has replaced much of the sweet and
tears.
Making Belong has forced me to balance being laid-back and introspective with the drive
to be brilliant, it has also made me to define ideas I once thought intangible. Belong has
provided a platform, my own soap box, in which I can explore new ideas in a concrete
medium while still being abstract. It has forced me to become more articulate and taught
me that strength and beauty in language is as important as what I’m saying. This
project also gives me a skill that has proven to be quite lucrative in recent years.
How on God’s green Earth did Mountlake Terrace High School prepare me for this?
Well, I’d love to thank all the mastery classes filled to the gills with busy-work
for allowing me the patience to make it through those black days when syntax errors filled
every waking moment. I’d also like to thank all my English teachers who’ve
helped me to reach this level of articulation and prevented me from sounding like a total
moron, all of my history teachers who’ve instilled in me a great thirst for knowledge
and interaction, my art teachers for giving me the language of aesthetics, and my math and
science teachers for showing me that innovation is the key to true brilliance.
When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks in to you. This Project proved to be far
from easy and in fact presented some of the most complex logic problems I’ve faced.
Making a web site was not the first project I had decided on; it was the third. It has
provided to be a rewarding endeavor and one I would do over again given the choice. It has
provided excuses for spending hours on something that otherwise would have been viewed as
unnecessary and may have never been explored to the extent that I have if it was not for
Application project. I’m very happy with the result and the knowledge it represents.