The Struggle of an Online Project

So, I have been working on this project for about a month now and I am having a bit of trouble. At first everything was going great; I had started getting submissions from people right off the bat and a lot of my friends (about 60) joined my group on Facebook. I was all excited because I thought I was going to get a bunch of submissions but after the first few days, no one seemed to really be interested anymore. I would get posts on my Facebook group from people telling me they had a bunch of stuff to send me and now it's about a month later and I've recieved very few submissions. Because of this, I decided to email the advisor of the literary magazine at my school to see if the people who send submissions to her would like to send submissions to me.

For my frontpage, I wanted to write about a new artist (known, unknown, famous, local, etc.) to get the word out there. I emailed this musician that I found on You Tube. He is amazing and I really want to do a write up about him. He emailed me back all excited and asked if I had any specific questions for him. I sent him some questions; it's been 4 days and I still haven't heard anything back from him.

I learned that I can't always rely on other people for my project. I have to make things work and figure out for myself what to do to make that happen.

Working on the Site

So, I found a website maker called SynthaSite and made a website called "The Lily Pad". It's not an actual website yet because I'm still working on it, but it seems to be coming out great so far. I made a group on Facebook where people can upload pictures to me. My email is also up there for people who wish to send me poems and/or short stories. So far two people have sent me poems and three (four including myself) have given me many photographs which I have uploaded.

What I'm also thinking about doing is adding an article a week about a modern day artist/writer or an event that involves art. I'm having a lot of trouble finding people/events to write about. I did numerous searches on Google News, New York Times, and even just plain old Yahoo! and I couldn't find anything. I think what I'm going to do is message all of the people in my Facebook group and see if they have anyone of interest that they want to know more about.

I'm so excited about this website, I hope that it will be up as soon as possible and that I will be able to find some type of "artsy" news available.

New Project

When I graduate college, I really want to write for a magazine...maybe eventually become editor of my own. I would really like to write for a fashion magazine or some type of literary magazine. For my final project for my journalism class, I would like to create some type of online magazine and find some way to gain traffic to my site.

I went on Yahoo! and searched "online magazines" and found a site called Magatopia. This site contains many links to all different websites of magazines. I looked at some of the websites that I would be interested in (Seventeen, Cosmo Girl, and Elle). These sites contain a variety of different applications ranging from quizzes, advice, fashion, celebrity news, and games. I think that this may be a little difficult for me to put together a site like this in such a short amount of time. I think I am going to go more of the literary magazine root and obtain works of art from people I know or maybe who I don't know.

Now I have to figure out how to make this website. I'm not really sure how to and I've never done it before. I've made a wikipage and a blog but nothing with links or anything that would really bring in traffic. I'll probably have to search for a site to find a free website maker.

Podcasting This I Believe

I finally finished my essay and I think that it is some what decent. As anyone can tell from some of my previous entries, I had an extremely difficult time starting this essay. I really couldn't think of any kind of idea. Everything I thought about seemed too juvenile or cliche to me; i felt like I could come up with a better topic. What I did come up with was how I had an experience that caused me not to trust people and how I eventually overcame that distrust.

It's not my best work but I guess I'll have to deal since I already recorded it. Yes, you read correctly, the whole class was asked to record our essays for the world to hear (well, maybe not the world but you catch my drift). I really hate my voice when I hear it on recordings or videos; I feel like I sound nasally and monotonous. It was a little hard to record it because I felt like I was stumbling on my words but the recording turned out to be something that I wouldn't mind sharing with other people.

The next step is uploading our recordings onto a page for another class of students, doing the same assignment, to listen to. We will also get a chance to listen to their essays and compare them with our own. I hope I get some good feedback on my essay/podcast; I'm really interested in finding out what people I don't know think of it.

The Buzz is Finally Buzzin'

So yesterday we finally got out our first issue of our school newspaper of the new school year. I can't believe we actually made it to 10 pages! I had made a poster and put out a box of the newspaper underneath it. Some of the staff helped me pass out the paper during lunch and around senior balcony. Surprisingly many people were really excited about it, though many wondered when we started to have a school newspaper...(it's been around forever by the way). I think we were so much more organized and from now on our paper is going to be so much better. Hopefully this year our reader turnout will be much larger. Eventually we are just going to put out a box of the newspapers so people can just pick one up; of course this will have to be after we can be sure that we have a large audience. I am very excited about the newspaper this year and I hope it keeps getting better

So, This I Believe...This is Getting to be Repetative

So this essay is not finished yet!! Please help with suggestions, I feel like this is going no where.
Essay:
What do I believe? That should be an easy question since it's a thought that is coming from inside of me, my own opinion, my own head. For some reason I can't really come up with much. What I can come up with, however, is what I can't believe. I have come to a state where I can't really trust people too often. When people cancel plans with me at the last minute, I always feel that they have found something better to do with their time. If people tell me that they will pay me back, I know I'll never see that money again. Sometimes I even have trouble believing that my friends really are my friends.
Back in middle school I had a little situation that occured between me and three other friends; two were girls and the other was a boy. Now I'm going to go with the style of Gossip Girl and use their initials: the two girls are W and J, the boy is M. So me and W were best friends; we had been for two years. This year I had finally gotten into our school play and had started becoming closer friends with J and M. Eventually I developed a crush on M and told W about it because I tell her everything. I thought I could trust her to keep it a secret but I shouldn't have because she ended up telling M all about it. He approached me one night after play practice and told me that he just wanted to be friends and that he really liked W.

Ok, so this essay is lame, I need to come up with a new idea. I was thinking of how I tend to get upset and say I hate my life when I know that there are many people in the world that have a way worse life than I do.

This I Believe....again

So, I'm still struggling a bit about what I am going to write about for this This I Believe essay. Originally I wanted to write about how my mistakes have changed me, but I have finally decided that any of my stories that would go along with this topic are way too cliche. I ended up thinking about another idea that I had. Because of some prior events, I have a problem trusting people. What I was thinking was instead of what I believe I'll write about what I can't believe. I'll probably even put in one, or both, of my stories to make it more personal. I hope this is a better idea than my last one and not as cliche, or unoriginal.....

I'M STILL SO CONFUSED!!!