Making a Portfolio Page

Creating a portfolio is something that most people should have when looking for a job. It's important to show what you are capable of and what you could bring to the table. You can use a portfolio to promote yourself, like creating a bio, putting up a professional picture of yourself and uploading the work you have done throughout the year. Nowadays, just having a plain resume might not get you the job that you want. Employers want to see what you have done and how you can be an addition to their team or the position that you are applying for.

It is important to upload your absolute best work. The social media projects that were done throughout the semester really tie-in with a portfolio because it shows that you have a voice and are active in the social media community. Having a LinkedIn is very important nowadays because it's basically the Facebook of the workplace. People can actually get good paying jobs right off of LinkedIn. Recruiters especially can find you and see your profile and your experiences and see if you're a good fit for a company. Having a blog can be a necessary thing to show to a potential employer because 1) they can see what kind of writer you are and if you constantly make mistakes or no mistakes at all 2) they can view your opinions about certain things depending what your blog is about. If you are making a career move that has to do with social media, then showing off your professional social media accounts is very important. Social media is rising up and in a few years, things will be very different than how they are now.

Using Adobe Dreamweaver to create a portfolio page was not as hard as it sounds. Being a previous Computer Science major, it wasn't difficult to work around coding when it was already there. Being careful with copying and pasting things, your coding should work just fine. It can be difficult sometimes because one little punctuation mark or even a blank space can mess up an entire code, which is very annoying because then you have to go looking for the error in all these lines of letters and numbers. With designing a layout, it was interesting to find out about different hex color codes you can use to pick a specific color that you would want to show on your portfolio.

Creating a header was also something interesting because there are many ways to show off creativity. I based my colors off of my header, which included pastel colors, so I wanted to go for a more pastel look to match. Adding content to your portfolio page was a process. First, if you had a word document, you had to go into Adobe Photoshop, photoshop the image to fit onto your portfolio, then save it as a JPEG and upload it. Then you had to link the image of the word document to the actual document so someone could see what was written. Also, if you have any videos that are a .mov, they had to be converted into an .mp4 in order for them to show on your portfolio page. Other than those intricate steps, I enjoyed making my online portfolio and I believe that potential employers would really like the work that I put into it.


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The Twitter Experience

What is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking website that allows users to publish short messages that can be seen by other users. The tweets can only be between 140 and 280 character, so you can't just type up a whole essay on it. Twitter, for the most part, is used up daily by people who use social media to tweet about themselves or reply tweet to other users. Most of the time though, it's used for marketing purposes. How does a company promote their product and reach their target audience? By using social media accounts. Everyone knows that pretty much 90% of the world uses social media. Whether it's for reading the news, streaming a live video, following and commenting on your favorite artist or celebrity's posts, or even just using it for plain ole fun. Now that social media has become way more popular than it was 5-10 years ago, a lot of people depend on social media because they have created a sort of "job" by just posting on their instagram. These people are called "Influencers." A lot of newspapers and politicians use twitter to their advantage to also reach younger crowds, knowing that around 18-25 year olds don't really read the newspaper or turn on the news to see who is running in the upcoming elections. So they turn to social media to get their topics out there. Newspapers mostly, are always tweeting about the articles they just posted, with a quick summary of it of course because of twitters limited character rules, and a link to go check it out. Twitter is also a place you can go to check of any breaking news about an event that occurred. Needless to say, twitter is pretty useful for many things.

There are many events that twitter covers in a brief tweet, usually has a link that shows the full article if you're still interested, that doesn't give away the full article, but gives just enough information to keep the reader intrigued. Lil Nas X released a single called Old Town Road and he remixed it with Billy Ray Cyrus and twitter went crazy. From memes (an amusing picture or video that spreads around the internet), to being happy Billy Ray was back in the spotlight for a hot minute. Many people said it's a pretty catchy song as well and I listened to it and I can say that yea, it's pretty good. Twitter was used to promote this song and they were successful in getting it to go viral. Twitter also gets important news across to its users by making the top story in their explore page the first thing you see. When the massacre in New Zealand happened, I first read about it on twitter and it was such a tragedy, but twitter did a good thing in keeping everyone still in the loop about what was happening. Sometimes you can even live stream news casts about important breaking news such as that one. The only negative thing of breaking news is that sometimes twitter tweets about celebrity news instead of actual real news that people should know about. I remember the whole Tristan and Jordyn Woods scandal broke out, it was all over twitter. Some would say it took over twitter for like a week, but it was unnecessarily all over everyones social media. I get that it was a pretty big story, but there were far more important things going on in the world to worry about.

The three topics/organizations I chose to follow were The New York Times, ASPCA and the PGA Tour. Choosing the New York Times was easy because I always like reading their articles. They are very well written and informative. The ASPCA is one of my favorite organizations because I am a fellow animal lover and all animals deserved to be loved and treated kindly. The ASPCA helps all those animals in need by using their voice to help them. It's a great organization to be a part of and following their twitter showed me all the great articles they write about and seeing all the achievements they have made relating to animals in need. Now, I followed the PGA Tour because 1) I have absolutely no clue about how golf is played whatsoever and 2) we were supposed to follow something we never really would. They tweet about golf related things and I just sit back and wonder what any of that even means.

This experience is different from actual blogging because of twitters character rules. You have to be specific and get straight to the point in your tweets. Using hashtags that other people search for also helps get your tweet to become somewhat viral if other people can relate to it. Sometimes getting straight to the point is kind of hard, but not impossible.


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Social Media Is Taking Over The World

In this day and age, having a social media account is where someone can access pretty much anything and everything at any time. Whether it's the latest celebrity gossip, breaking news or even what someone had for breakfast. The entire world is at the palm of their hands and that could either be a good thing or a bad thing. When the world had no social media, it was a simpler time. If someone wanted to get in contact with another person, they would simply send them a handwritten letter. Now, sending quick text messages or direct messages on social media is the new norm.

 Social media is everywhere and used for almost everything. Some people would see social media as harmless with no negative effects, it's just something used for fun, but there are actually a lot of negative aspects about social media, especially if someone posts about their everyday life with specific details. Netflix just released a new show called "You" and it is about a man who becomes obsessed with this girl that came into his book store. She used her credit card, giving him her full name and he found everything about her on her social media accounts, even where she lived by a single picture! That is so crazy because it honestly is true. People out there can find out those things by just a single social media post.

Another issue with social media is that people actually get seriously addicted to it and it affects their mental health. Someone who has been affected by social media is actress Lucy Hale. She stated in an interview "It's almost like a disease. We're all so addicted to it, and to what other people are saying. Honestly I know it sounds cheesy to say that social media was affecting my happiness, but it really was. It was important for me to disconnect from that, to put down my phone occasionally and live the life around me." Seeing children and young teenagers have a cellphone and that are already on social media is scary because they compare themselves a lot to what they see and it affects their natural growth.

There are upsides to social media though. Many businesses use social media as a way to promote their business. It can be used as an online marketplace or even an online alert system for missing people, children or pets. Something that is shown constantly is people sharing posts or retweeting tweets of other people posting about their missing loved ones. So bottom line, social media can be a blessing or a curse. There is no in between. It is said a lot to people posting on their social media accounts to be careful what they post. Social media can only going up from here. Who knows what technology might bring to media platforms in the future. One can only hope it's good, positive things and everybody realizing that social media is not a force to be reckoned with.


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