This reflexive or reflective video documents and reflects on my journey and development as a ‘Community Reporter’ for the Community Media module at De Montfort University (DMU) and my wider studies of Communication Arts. It will take you through a number of encounters, interviews and highlights which are highlighted in my various blog posts.

Technically, but also otherwise, I am constantly trying to improve my WordPress Blog. I have now added direct quotes to every article in Assignment Three. First of all, I provided the name of the quoted person with a hyphen and a new line but have now, after looking at quote examples on a number of news websites, decided to have a hyphen without a new line and eventually placed the person’s name in round brackets. I have seen it done on news sites and feel it looks best. All these seemingly small details matter I feel.

I am still struggling with smaller pictures right or left aligned and text flowing beside the images but have not come yet to a workable and satisfying solution because the images display too small and the captions are too long. It doesn’t look nice, although I recognize that my pictures are way too big. There seems to be very little control in WordPress but by experimentation, I am sure I will discover a workable solution.

I also made sure that every image has a caption, which John pointed out to me. He also pointed out to have direct quotes. I knew the Blockquote feature in WordPress but only now I make regular use of it.

There are still a number of issues with WordPress I would like to resolve. To date, I haven’t been able to activate the ‘Post to Twitter’ feature, while RSS seems to work now. Overall, my template is ok but not good enough and I may change it eventually. It is a shame that I don’t have full admin rights to WordPress as so many more features could be activated. This is a serious drawback of the DMU server. On the other hand, a free WordPress account outside of DMU will place adverts in my blog, which I feel, is even a worse solution. Of course, a paid WordPress account would address all these issues. As of 20/11/2018 I do not feel my content on the DMU server is safe, because there has been a security breach, which has endangered my entire WordPress site.

One word about my DMU Wiki page. I have added a reference section to it, as John suggested. I have also added small thumbnail images to every blog. However, due to the nature of the Wiki software these thumbnails, or any other picture in the Wiki, are difficult to control. They change with the width and screen resolution of the browser and are therefore all over the place. The only remedy I found so far is writing a considerable amount of text. I may well adopt a rather scientific 1.1 and 1.1.2 style instead of the thumbnails. This is what the Wiki is meant for and what displays best and without problems. It is, therefore, a work in progress, continuous improvement.

This continuous improvement is also reflected in the blog posts themselves as I find myself adding new content, which I come across in my daily reading, to already existing posts.

The following video interview features the LMSDC, (Leicester Media School Drawing Centre) established by Chris Wright, which is referenced in the reflective video above.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdRrLzLruY]