Ongoing Investigations

Tag: reclaim hosting

  • Answering the Challenge

    Maren challenged me to take part in a sort of blogging chain mail challenge, answering questions about my blogging process and my history with the blog.

    I don’t post on here very often (my most recent post is from nearly a year ago, yikes!) but answering some questions seemed like a simple and quick way to get back in the blogging rhythm.

    Tagging Taylor to keep it going!

    Why did you start blogging in the first place?

    I would say I originally started blogging “for real” when I was a Digital Scholarship intern at Carleton. We had a blog for all the DS interns to share their work — hosted on DoOO, actually! — and one of my job responsibilities was that once a week, I would research a recent digital ethics question or topic, and write a short post summing it up for the library (with citations of course).

    I really liked it because it felt like a way both to learn and to put my thoughts together. And because it was a regular responsibility, it meant I wasn’t too precious with it — doing the research and getting the post out was the main thing.

    What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

    I use WordPress to manage my blog, mostly because that’s what the DS intern blog used, and so it’s what I’m used to. It was really convenient to be able to take an export of all my research posts and then import them directly into this blog (though I did have to do a bunch of tag cleanup…)

    Have you blogged on other platforms before?

    Sometimes! When I was younger (a lot younger, so much so that I wouldn’t even know where to find this stuff anymore), I played around on Blogspot for about a week and then got bored. More recently, I’ve used Ghost as part of my work for Reclaim, since we use that for our monthly newsletter and our breaking news announcements blog.

    How do you write your posts?

    Usually I’ll skeleton out my thoughts as an outline, adding in notes and thoughts as I have them. Once I feel like I’m done with that, I’ll go back and either write start-to-finish or grab a section where I had a lot of notes and thoughts and write that. There’s a lot of jumping around in my process, so even when I do draft a post, a lot of times it never gets finished.

    In terms of where I draft, I do that in WordPress. For a while I was writing in Obsidian or GDocs or whatever other word processor was my choice at the time, but copy-pasting into WP was a huge headache. I don’t really like how the FSE means that the word processor looks like my blog theme, though — I find it distracting. Though that’s probably a sign that I should change my blog style, TBH.

    When do you feel most inspired to write?

    Usually towards the end of the day, when I can get my thoughts in order.

    Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

    I might let it simmer for maybe fifteen minutes. Anything more than that and it’s up and gone. I spend enough time noodling around in the drafting phase that I don’t need a post to sit for any longer than necessary.

    What’s your favorite post on your blog?

    I wouldn’t say I have any particular favorite posts, but I picked a couple of ones that popped into my head fondly for one reason or another:

    • Working from Home? Hardly Working – This is one of the research posts I wrote for Carleton, back during Spring of 2020 when school had just gone remote. It’s a collection of work-from-home resources, and I had a lot of fun researching them and hoping that people would find them useful.
    • The Finger-painting Approach – This blog post was me reflecting on building a very crappy HTML/CSS site, giving myself permission to make something that was not only unpolished but actively bad. It’s something I wish I felt comfortable doing more often.
    • The Persistence Project: What It Was, How It Went – A short summary of one of the projects I worked on as a DS intern, putting together resources to help the library get people to think more deeply about the longterm life of their digital projects. I credit that project with a lot of how I think about archival and preservation today.
    • Monster of the Week in 2022 & 2023 – This post turned two a week or so ago. I’m including it on here mostly because I very rarely let myself do non-work blogging on here, so it’s fun to look back at a post that’s purely hobby.

    Any future plans for the blog?

    The more I look at it, the more I feel like I should probably change my blog theme. So that first, and then we’ll see. Maybe a new theme will get me more hyped to write.

  • Drafting a Scope of Work

    This past week I had cause to make a scope of work for a client from scratch, which is something I don’t get to do very often. I figured I could blog the process just to document it, though I’m not going to share any examples from the actual SOW I made — just outlines.

    I actually had a scope of work that I’d made back in 2022 (!) available in Google Drive, which I only remembered existed by coincidence. But it was a nice find, because it meant that I could reuse all of the formatting work I’d done previously, even if all the content had to be jettisoned. I could also build off the structure of the old one/scrap or add parts as needed.

    The overall structure was:

    • Title
    • Contextual information
      • the client’s institution
      • the name & title of the person I’m preparing it for
      • my name & title
      • the date
    • Overview (context section that goes sort of broadest to narrowest on detail – the name of the product/service and what the client’s needs are, then info on the product/service and how it will meet those needs)
    • Work Breakdown (specific steps that will happen in order to provide the product/service – both what we’re responsible for & what the client will need to do)
      • If I need to give a specific explanation of why a step has to happen a certain way, I’ll do it here, but I try to keep it short
      • Mode of delivery, if there’s specific deliverables
      • Hours required for a service, if a certain step needs it
      • This bit got split into multiple sections for the SOW I made, because there were multiple things the client wanted & each one had different things that needed to happen
    • Costs Breakdown (a table of costs with the following columns):
      • Unit type
      • # of units
      • Item/description
      • Unit price
      • Total item price

    In other SOWs I could probably include a specific work timeline or relevant history between Reclaim and the client, or other information if it’s needed, but it wasn’t for this.

    The other important thing was a sanity check. I ran this by Taylor, Amanda and Jim, and they noticed some big changes that needed making (Taylor in particular found a point where I was seriously overcomplicating things!)

    I found the process pretty fun! Drafting this kind of thing from scratch doesn’t come up all that much, but somehow it feels like helping to create something totally new, which is just plain cool.

css.php