I have just spent some time creating test pages for a new portfolio site. I think the vertical scrollspy page is going to be the cleanest. What I need to do with it is clean up the colors and text and begin adding my own content. The question, I think, is whether I should stick with the current portfolio outline - about, teaching, scholarship, music - or should I simplify. I don’t really need to add a section for coding since the entire portfolio is essentially one coding portfolio. As long as I use a number of tricks and features I have learned along the way it should be cool. I need to remember to include a modal, the Sun Ra quote generator, and any other trick I can dredge up from my reusable code folder. I don’t want to create an including-the-kitchen-sink kind of page, but I do need to show off the range of my coding abilities.

In addition, the portfolio should show off my site design and writing skills. I should really go through the entire web design process in order to make sure the site is dead clear. This means I may need to ask someone to play with the site and give me feedback. I’m sure Beazle will help me with that. In fact, maybe I should set a time goal of August for finishing a portfolio site so I can get multiple people to look at it while we are all visiting mom. It may be the only time I’ll have a sizable captive audience who I assume will be willing to help. It may also help my family to better understand what it is I do.

One of the ways I look at coding is as a means of creating frameworks for publishing my writing. Writing, in this case, is really everything I do: teaching is writing, music is writing, blogging…every professional activity I do can be boiled down to some type of writing. This is another reason why freewriting is so important to my overall professional skill set - improving my ability to write quickly will improve my overall productivity. I would love to be able to stress a bit less about creating teaching materials for my classes. That’s an activity that seems to take up a good portion of my working time when I am in the middle of teaching a new class. I will look forward to re-teaching the American history classes, though, given that I already have a good collection of substantial PowerPoint presentations for each chapter of Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty! texts.

And speaking of these teaching materials, it will now be easy to include representative PowerPoint presentations in my online portfolio since I finally figured out how to embed them using Google Docs. I will need to edit the presentations since embedded videos don’t work well within the PowerPoints, but that’s not difficult. Any materials I post with regard to my American history courses need to be supplemented with links to the Crash Course U.S. History videos since Crash Course seems to have used Foner’s texts as their reference material (I should write to the Crash Course people to confirm that this is the case.).

Let me get to it.