Final Project (13-2)

www.endthebubble.com

For my final project I taught myself how to create a website, starting with purchasing a domain name, finding a hosting site, and building up the elements of the site using Wordpress.  I customized my Wordpress site using widgets and I did a lot of troubleshooting and looking at the coding in order to get the site to be what I wanted.  When I had trouble uploading a file I was able to look at the source code and determine what was causing the issue.

The goal was to create an online community where people could respectfully share differing opinions.  I decided the best way to do this would be to create a forum with an option to either create a user name and log in, or post anonymously.  I began the project by reaching out to people that I knew would have an opinion that was different from mine.  The sad thing was that that didn't amount to very many people.  I didn't realize how much I surrounded myself with people that agreed with me until I combed through my network looking for different ideas.  Out of my 900 or so Facebook friends, I chose to contact 20 or so people, and most of them I was pretty sure would still say the same things I would, just in more interesting ways.

I decided to reach outside of my network, which meant putting myself out into the world and talking to random people.  This was the performance element of my project.  I bought 100 small bubble tubes, wrote the website address on them, made myself a t-shirt and planted myself in front of the post-it wall in Union Square.  I stayed there until I had handed out all of my stickers and bubble tubes and I talked to people about the site.  For the most part it was a great experience, but there were a few awkward interactions.  I hope it leads to new people posting on the site, but if nothing else it was interesting to be out in the world talking to people, and I made a lot of strangers smile with the tubes of bubbles.  If nothing else comes out of it that was enough for me.