Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Process of Creating a Wiki How

https://www.wikihow.com/Get-the-Best-Deal-on-a-Car-Lease
The process of creating a wiki how page has been an interesting experience with plenty of ups and downs. First off, the idea of coming up with a topic that no one else at this point has come up presents its giant set of difficulties and took a decent amount of time alone without having to do anything else to this point in the process. 
Once the topic was picked, what proved best to go step by step through topic to explain it accurately was personal experience. Since the topic at hand was How to Best Lease a Car, with my profession being in car sales, this seemed the best option to go forward with. Yes, there is a process which was gone over in the article, but nothing helped more than personal experiences and knowledge of the industry over the 2 plus years living in it. 
As there were many steps to this project it was somewhat difficult to procure pictures for each individual step. The most difficult being for example was credit scores. This is something that you can’t just take a picture of or share since it is personal information. So, the need to go online and find a good diagram of this was needed to ensure a picture was available. Also, it was quite difficult to get pictures inside the dealership. Given the time of the month, it was quite busy inside the dealership. Finding people and time to be able to find a person and a space to use was difficult. At the end of the day it was successful and felt great to get the pictures and get that much closer to finishing the assignment.
One of the biggest challenges with this topic was how to order the steps for the leasing process. At first the idea was to have it in two parts. The first part being research and figuring out personal financing, the second was going to be dealership interaction. At the end of the day though, the decision was made to just unify it all and make it one giant process rather than 2. This made it much easier to order.
It was also quite difficult to have to figure out a way to accurately try and explain the process since each car lease is entirely unique. Everyone has a different credit score, money to put down and car price to work with which makes not every single situation the same. Alas it was figured out and can be seen present in the final product on the Wiki How page.
One of the most interesting things about this Wiki How assignment was learning how to code it. First and foremost, it was interesting that coding was even necessary. One would figure all that would need to be done would be to write, paste or copy things into a text box and hit submit. But alas, that is not the case. Coding must be done to ensure that the page looks and functions properly as well as to ensure everything is in the right spot and formatted correctly. Learning this is interesting. Its nowhere near as complicated as one would suspect. Once the needed words, characters and the like are learned its actually very simple, just extremely time consuming. It is a unique experience and something to recommend for most people who wish to create an online presence to try out at least once.
For the page pictures were required. Another unique experience that pertains to this, learning how to use Adobe Photoshop, abet very basically. Learning that for the pictures to function properly you first need to shoot them in landscape mode was interesting but makes sense, since the other way would distort and stretch the picture. It was also cool to learn that the pictures needed to be a certain dimension to work on Wiki How and it was nice to learn how simple and easy that way to fix and do on Photoshop itself.
It was also nice to learn how to change the contrast and other unique characteristics of the pictures in Photoshop. It is surprising how daunting this all seems at first but once you know where everything is, it is extremely simple and user friendly to finalize the pictures.
One giant concern has been that once published the readers won’t understand or think that the article in question doesn’t need to exist. Worse would be for the general public to feel as if the Wiki How article didn’t help at all or was just rambling. It was created to be an assistance tool and the hope is that at least one person who reads it will feel as if their leasing experience was somewhat aided by the fact that they read this article.

https://www.wikihow.com/Get-the-Best-Deal-on-a-Car-Lease

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Social Media: Ups, Downs, and Everything Inbetween


There is no denying social media has radically changed how life as the world knows it works. Everyone knows what everyone is doing. Whether someone is eating, or the next-door neighbor is finally single, there isn't much that is private or unknown for most people now a days. This has its ups and downs of course. Sometimes it can be extremely nice, like following your favorite sports team or entertainment thing whether that is movies, TV or video games. It can be extremely convenient, but does this come with a cost?
Look at the many instances of President Trump on Twitter. Love him or hate him, there is no denying that when our president tweets it leaves an impression. The president has sent out tweets ranging from little comments here or there to full on tirades. Some containing information or opinions that we have never seen from a president, at least in the public space, ever before. This causes severe backlash, with many people clamoring for the president to lose his Twitter rights to the opposite, with people praising the man for his honesty. Regardless of stance, this is completely new ground. It raises the question of if there should be limits to our usage of social media? Should people in power be able to have the ability to post things such as Trump has willynilly? The question won’t be answered here, that’s for sure, but it is something fun to think about none the less.
It is crazy to think about where social media was with its beginning with the likes of AOL and Myspace, to Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram literally leading the charge and taking control of peoples lives like nothing else before. What does the future hold with this though? Will it all collapse, or will it continue to thrive or even expand. Will there come a day where Facebook is literally implanted in our brains with likes, comments and pictures just literally flashing before our very eyes with no escape whatsoever? It will be years down the road till the world knows but hopefully that is just a thought or dream and not a reality.
Maybe it completely collapses. Courts and lawsuits have been starting to pop up more frequently against these companies, most famously the recent case with Mark Zukerberg of Facebook fame having to defend Facebook from invading your privacy and sharing information without consent. If this continues, especially if its people who don’t understand the programs who throw out these suits left and right, the whole social media climate has a chance of collapsing. If these apps can’t connect to things like amazon or other sponsorships that bring in revenue, it could very well be doomsday. Maybe that’s good though. Maybe we all need to get off our phones and just live a little. Maybe we need more one on one. Get a little dirty in person instead of sending dirty pictures or just swiping left or right. Just learn to humanize.

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