Final Stretch Progress: Studio Website & Podcast

So there’s good news, great news, and “pending” (please refer to my Construction Timeline post)…

The good news is that I’ve been able to set up contributors to my page for the Op-Eds and Reviews portion of my page. My brother works in Denver and is extremely well-spoken, so it will be great to have him do some videogame and film reviews. What I’ll have to talk with him about is the size, style, and summary selection for the reviews. I’m leaning towards not giving titles a number score because I feel it can cheapen a product and is difficult to take into account everything a medium or experience offers. Reducing a 2-hour film, 10-hour show, or worse a 120-hour videogame to a single digit not only seems disingenuous to the effort of the creation and the time spent enjoying (or enduring) it, but also limits the writer’s ability to connect with the target audience—If you score it at the top people will begin your article with preconceptions and may misinterpret or outright dismiss your content, and if you score it at the bottom people may gloss over the discussion and opinions you’re writing about to find the number, the big take-away. I feel that avoiding this trap will, at least for the beginning of my site, be the best way to connect with readers and offer an objective perspective.

I have also set up Isabel Smith-Bernstein, graduate student at CU specializing in theatre and Shakespearean literature, to comment on artistic events and cultural developments through the opinions columns.

The great news is that Thinkly has just this past week been approved by iTunes, Google Play, and TuneIn for listing in their stores and podcast directories! That’s a tremendous encouragement to me and will allow me to continue this project and make aesthetic and stylistic improvements to the content, presentation, and artwork (theme music and cover) while reaching a real audience.

The “pending” actions are the nitty-gritty of the coding and layout debugging. I have been focused on the content and podcast that I haven’t had much time to address these goals, but now that the podcast and contributions can be checked “complete,” I will dive deep into the world of web script languages to pursue my aesthetic goals even further. I have signed up for a free CSS & HTML introduction session in Denver next week and hope to enlist the aid of my brother yet again (bachelor’s in Computer Science) to help me realize my vision.

Lastly, it is appearing that the professional content goal will be a post-launch improvement… it is proving difficult and time-consuming (mostly waiting around) to get permission to publish my contributions to former employers online. Engineering drawings are, of course, typically private intellectual property, for in-house use and to provide manufacturing information to vendors and suppliers. I may have to scrap this goal as far as the scope of the course project is concerned, but it will be front-and-center on my radar for future content updates.

Thanks for reading! I’m excited to show off the final product at the Expo and see the awesome works everyone else has put together.