About the Final Project Site
Before May 12, you’ll add your story about Food and Migration to the final web project site. As a class, we decided to go with the same design as Professor Rosenblum’s class last year. Here is their site, to give you a sense of what we’re going for: New York Dreams.
We are building the final project site with WordPress, which is the platform e-portfolios uses. Our course site is powered by WordPress, so adding to the final project site won’t be too drastically different from adding a post to the course site.
When you make a WordPress site (or your own e-portfolio, same thing) you get to choose a theme. This theme provides an aesthetic unity and organizes content for you. The theme of our final project site is Jorgen. In order to generate the slick magazine-like stories we are generating, we are using a plugin called Aesop Story Engine. When you add your content, you’ll be creating a new post, and then navigating the features of Aesop Story Engine to add interesting multimedia elements like photos, videos, audio, or maps.
I’ve created a sample story on the course site to showcase some of the basic tools: photos, characters, videos, and pull quotes (you’ll need to have joined the site in order to view it). Below, I explain how I added those features. This site has a bunch of examples of impressive uses of Aesop Story Engine: Aesop Story Engine Showcase. Check out the help page of that site for assistance with any of the components you may wish to add.
All of this may seem confusing, but it just takes a bit of focus and a willingness to play around and search for answers online! I promise you’ll get it, and once you do you’ll create a beautiful story.
Adding your content
*Please note that some of the screencast videos are taken from last year’s site. Aesop Story Engine has changed some of the formatting of their menus, but the instructions remain the same!
Step 1: Join the site
I’ve added every class member to the site. Once you’ve accepted the email invitation to join, login to e-portfolios and visit the site here. We won’t make it public until it is all polished and ready to go!
Step 2: Create a New Post
Nothing surprising here.
Create a new post and title it. Choose a short, snappy title.
Step 3: Set a Subhead
Enter your subhead in the “Excerpt” field. If it does not appear on your screen, you may have to enable it first.
Enable the Excerpt field (if necessary) and enter your subhead.
Step 4: Set a Featured Image
The featured image becomes the image background for your story tile on the landing page as well as the cover image at the top of your story. Make sure to use a wide, high-resolution image. If you took an image yourself, great. Otherwise, you can use public domain or Creative Commons stock images. Make sure to add an attribution if required.
Set a featured image and add a photographer attribution if required by the Creative Commons license.
Step 5: Add Your Copy
This is pretty obvious, though it might help to enable “Paste as Text” mode if your text contains weird formatting (e.g., differing font sizes and faces) that you want to get rid of.
For relaxing time, make it gremlin zapping time.
Step 6: Add Components
This is where the Aesop engine comes in! Most Aesop functions are accessible by clicking on the “Add Component” button.
How to get to the confusing Aesop menus.
Pull quotes
First, let’s use the pull quote component. There are lots of options you can play with, but the most important thing is to enter in the quote.
**UPDATED TIP** Your pull quote won’t show up unless you make the following edits to it: under “Quote Styles” choose “Full Width” instead of the default “Pull Quote”.
Please feel free to play around with the options. You can’t really break anything.
Videos
I’ll show you how to embed a video from an external source, in this case YouTube. Only cut and paste the last part of the link YouTube gives you for sharing. So, when pasting the video ID, cut out the “http://youtube/” and only paste the combination of letters and numbers at the end of the URL (the Video ID).
Audio
I’m not sure which audio formats Aesop supports, but to play it safe, try to use common formats like MP3.
Note that if you want a component to appear in a different part of your story, it’s as easy as cutting and pasting the shortcode (the stuff in the square brackets) to a different part of your post.
Map
You’ll notice in my sample story that I’ve added both the Map component (which makes the map appear on the left side of the story) and the Maps Marker component (which makes the map on the left side of the story move from point to point as you scroll through the story).
To add a marker to the map, scroll to the bottom of your story and click on a place much like you would a google maps marker. Give it a name on the map. That name will be the name of the marker you then insert into the story if you want the map to move from marker to marker.
Characters
In the above screen shots (in the Maps section), the two circular photos are featured using the “Characters” component. The instructions for that component are pretty self explanatory. In order to find those images, I did an advanced google search for images that are “free to use and modify” according to their licenses.
When adding other components, feel free to ask me (Bronwyn, your ITF) for help. But first, please take time to explore and experiment with the various options! You don’t have to add your whole story in one sitting.
Last step: What to name our site?
Final Site Name
Suggest a name for our final web project here.
Suggestions submitted so far:
- This form does not have any entries yet.
Food to Fight Back
If you live in New York you’ve most likely Jewish food at some point in your life. Jewish delis are quite common and certain Jewish foods such as bagels have become New York classics. But how many of you reading this have attended Passover dinner, braved the gefilte fish or baked your own challah bread? If you’ve done all three you’re probably fairly involved with the Jewish community, and you may have knowledge on some of the things I’m about to discuss. After speaking with several of my Jewish friends, family members, and friends of family members I began to notice some common themes about Jewish food and culture in our country or at least in New York. It seems that the preparation of Jewish food serves as a fun introduction into Jewish culture and a medium to commemorate events in Jewish history.
When talking to my mother and our family friend Yvette, I noticed that they both saw the cuisine as an excellent way to introduce their kids to Jewish traditions. My grandmother had come from Vienna during World War II when she was very young. One of the only parts of Jewish culture she had really internalized was the preparation of Jewish food and celebration of the holidays. She then passed these things onto my mother. My mom felt that when she first wanted to introduce Jewish tradition into our family the more spiritual aspect intimidated her, and food was a familiar place to start. My mother said Jewish cuisine felt very non-threatening and she believed our family would more readily accept that part of the Jewish traditions. Also, she felt that food could be used as a springboard into further exploration of Judaism.
My Jewish friends seemed to agree that food is one of the best starting points for learning about Jewish culture. In the words of my friend Shira, “Food is the first thing you learn to like about Judaism.” At the same interview table my friend Sarah nodded in agreement. Sarah and Shira told me about how they would make challah bread with their mothers from a young age, learning the different ingredients and braiding patterns of the dough. Both the parents and the children of Jewish families seemed to value food as a good segway into involvement with Jewish culture.
So how exactly does food rope in all the other aspects of Jewish culture? When I asked my mother if cooking Jewish food helped her feel connected to Jewish tradition or our family history, she said that it helps her feel connected on a personal level to her mother and to Jewish tradition aside from attending temple. She likes learning about the symbolism of the foods and the holidays which they are prepared for. From the younger perspective, which I gained from the same two friends I mentioned before, food gives a similar connection to Jewish history. With Jewish history comes Jewish holidays and with Jewish holidays comes food. So we eat the food and learn about the holidays and thus our cultural history. From Seder plates to remember Jewish enslavement in Egypt, to honey dipped apples for a sweet New Year, food is there to teach Jewish traditions. Shira and Sarah said that Jewish holidays and the culture at large are centered around food. At all occasions it brings people together and shows prosperity and thankfulness. “Most of the Jewish holidays are about some form of oppression in the past, somebody tried to kill us or enslave us so we fight back with our food and celebration.”
Jewish food seems to be a great way to keep Judaism thriving by providing an easy introduction to the Jewish faith and commemorating Jewish cultural history. Many Jewish families introduce the food and the holidays as a way to preserve the collective memory of the Jewish faith and to celebrate past oppressions and their thankfulness for their current freedom. Jewish cuisine allows Jews to dig into their meal and their culture simultaneously, and to fight back at their history of mistreatment with celebration and merriment.
I feel stupid now
Haha – no worries, Noah! Your story is a great read 🙂 I can’t wait to see it on the final site!
LOL. I laughed soo hard
Could we submit more than one name suggestion?
jk, I figured it out!