🌸 Digital Garden

What I’ve done

• Activate our leedsnewmedia.net hosting account and familiarise ourselves with it;
• Create a HTML file using our choices of editing software;
• Upload the file via SFTP to our New Media hosting spaces to be viewed publicly;
• Begin to think about the structure of an online portfolio.

POINT 1

• Having gone through many UPS and DOWNS
• Try changing to another network if denied access.(hotspot is useful in most of the times)

POINT 2

Steps when using mac:

• launchpad-other-text editor-format-main plain text-file-save-change the name to “index.html” AFTER saving it as txt..(choose safri as open mode, and can check!)
• If edit is needed, change the suffix of file name into “.txt”

POINT 3

Enter cPanel-files-file manager-pubilc_html-upload

POINT 4

Can not log in again.Hotspot is not useful this time.

More thoughts

This workshop felt like a little “build-your-first-website” adventure for me. Even though the process didn’t look too complicated, once I actually started doing it, I definitely went through quite a few ups and downs. Activating the leedsnewmedia.net account alone took several tries—when the network wasn’t cooperating, it was honestly frustrating. Sometimes switching networks or using a hotspot magically fixed the problem, but I also found out that it doesn’t always work.

When creating the HTML file, I also ran into some Mac-specific issues. For example, TextEdit doesn’t open in plain-text mode by default, and saving index.html requires saving it as a txt file first and then changing the extension. It felt a bit troublesome, but struggling through it helped me understand why file formats matter so much.

Uploading the file to public_html and seeing my page appear online for the first time was really satisfying—it made all the effort feel worth it. And throughout the process, I also started thinking about how I want to structure my future online portfolio and what I want it to look like.

Overall, this workshop took me from “I have no idea what I’m doing” to actually putting a webpage online. Even though there were plenty of bumps along the way, those challenges helped me build a clearer understanding of web hosting, FTP, and how front-end files work together. I’m looking forward to developing this little site further and turning it into a more complete and professional portfolio.

Reading references

• Platforms are architectures for action that enable and constrain social, cultural, economic, and political possibilities, and shape how we structure, represent, and experience the world. Platforms are socio-technical infrastructures that can coordinate, consolidate, extend, and empower the activities of individuals, communities, corporations, and other actors.
• The introduction of new media technologies invariably brings about potent social and economic shifts. We are well into one of those shifts as the advent of the consumer internet has destabilized existing models of news production and distribution and enabled new hegemons to establish massive and powerful businesses.
• As Paul Starr established in his magisterial The Creation of the Media (Paul, 2005), the paths taken by different nations in their adoption of new communication technologies (movable type, postal mail, telegraph, radio) depend on the politics and economics of the nation as a whole and vary widely from country to country.
• Our solutions cannot be limited to asking these platforms to do a better job of meeting their civic obligations – we need to consider what technologies we want and need for digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies.
• But WeChat is much more: a marketplace for downloadable and streaming digital content, a currency and payment system, an ecosystem that supports thousands of third-party applications, including taxi and delivery services.
• There was no shortage of idealism at the advent of the commercial internet, and the success of projects like Wikipedia and open-source software suggests that values-driven projects have an important role to play online.
• The American model of introducing public media as a correction to market failures suggests that it’s possible to build ambitious public service media well after the advent of a new medium.
• Public service digital media tools shouldn’t seek to dominate markets through scale – they don’t need to assemble millions of eyeballs for resale to advertisers. Instead, they should support diverse use cases, more like WordPress, a flexible open-source publishing platform, than like a commercially funded entity like Facebook. Further, a public service digital media model allows a diversity of platforms to serve a diversity of cultures with locally customized and appropriate tools, likely by giving communities more control over the rules that govern these new fora and how they are enforced.
• Finally, public service digital media need to help create an ecosystem of alternative social networks, designed for use by a wide range of communities for conversation, deliberation, and mobilization.
• An alternative to the dominance of Facebook and Twitter in the social media space is a wave of alternative social media platforms designed to meet the needs of local geographic communities and communities of interest.