For my last progress report, I want to focus on the feedback we’ve gotten from both COPLAC students and professors. I like to think about feedback as advice on how to strengthen our website instead of just as something that points out our flaws. The feedback we got from Cara and Karina was really helpful, both in person and on hypothesis. I definitely think adding the transcripts of the news articles is smart because they will help people read them and make them searchable. It’s good to have this feedback because I can read the articles so I wasn’t thinking other people wouldn’t be able to, but now I know how to make our site better. Similarly, we’ve been working on this site for so long and there are typos we need to fix because I’ve been reading it and rereading it for so long that I just read it how I wanted to read it, so I’m grateful for help in that area.

There are some things I’m not sure how to fix, such as the italics in the Timeline JS or the color of the hyperlinks, but Sean and I are going to tackle that this week. Another fix that is less straightforward to me is the permission from the D&C because I’m a bit confused. I had asked about that a few weeks ago and I thought that Leah said because I got the articles from newspapers.com permission from the newspaper wasn’t needed, so I’m not sure where to go from here. Also, I’m not sure what pictures to insert to break up the text. I don’t want to randomly insert images that aren’t related, so I’m hoping Sean has some ideas for that.

I’m excited to tackle all the feedback otherwise because it feels a bit like spring cleaning. Organizing and cleaning up the website is almost therapeutic. It didn’t occur to me until reading the feedback that some links and stuff would be faulty because they worked for me. Now I realize I will have to look at the website while logged out so that I can see what a third party observer sees and understand what they experience. I really appreciate the feedback we got because sometimes when you create something it’s hard to look at it and see its flaws. One of the things I really appreciate is that with the constructive criticism there were also compliments. It’s nice to know that some things work well and makes it easier to see how other aspects need to be enhanced. I really felt good about these comments from Cara and Karina and am happy we all got to engage in this peer feedback.

Another benefit of the feedback is that going over it demonstrates what might be our main parts of the website. This will help Sean and I figure out what pages we want to showcase when we do our presentation