My web presence: you’re looking at it.
I registered my domain, beckwise.com, in May 2011, with the intention of building it out as a portfolio site in advance of my applications to PhD programs later that year. It was initially built as a Google site but in January 2013, while working in the UWC and angling for a spot in the DWRL, I moved the site to a new host because I thought building my site in Drupal, then the Lab’s sole supported CMS, would show willing — and I’d published extensively on a Drupal backend as a writer for Derby News Network, so how hard could it be to build my own Drupal site from scratch? Well …
Hard. Let me note, too, that DNN transitioned to WordPress when we no longer had a Drupal dev on staff. And when I asked my colleague who oversaw that transition if he remembered writing something about why we made that decision, he sent me this:
Since my own move to WordPress, I’ve experimented with the site a fair bit, both its form (oh, the free themes I’ve tried out) and its content (‘Blogging the Field Exam’ was not, it turned out, for me). Most recently, I’ve been digging into theme modification to extend the functionality of this site, the effects of which are most visible in the landing page for my Digital Writing & Research Certificate.
Rather than building my portfolio as a series of pages, manually linked together, I’ve set them up as posts within a WordPress category. The Section Widget plugin allowed me to build certificate-specific navigation which appears on all posts within the DWRC category and the Posts In Page plugin let me embed posts from that category in my certificate landing page. The latter didn’t, however, allow much control over the appearance of the posts on the landing page, so I created a child theme (the easy way) and altered my site’s PHP to include featured images on the Posts In Page view and hide them on individual posts. I also learnt how to FTP into my host to replace site files after I made a PHP change that took down the entire site — a major problem when you’re accustomed to using the web interface that came with your one-click install, rather than an uploaded WordPress install.
Most of the rest of my site is pretty standard WordPress — although with my new confidence outside the WYSIWYG editor, that may change in the next year before I am on the job market. Currently, my static content is built out as pages and categorised according to my various spheres of employment. I am still thinking through the best way to build out my digital portfolio on this site and in particular, whether the academic/journalism divide should be represented in that portfolio given the cross-pollination of skills (discussed elsewhere) between those spheres.
Sites that I control — on Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, HASTAC, the DWRL website and of course this domain — are 7 of 10 of the (my) top Google results when I search for ‘Beck Wise’. One is my local roller derby profile page, for which I wrote the content, and the last two are Facebook hits for people who share my name — suggesting that if I were on Facebook, I might be able to collect the whole page (not worth it). Most of these are linked to from this site, allowing it to serve as a hub for my widespread professional web presence.