The Digital Portfolio

Your final responsibility in 267 is to add a digital portfolio to your blog site.  This will help you by creating a good, solid, online presence that you can use as part of your job, internship, or scholarship applications.  It will also give you good practical experience mixing digital media compositions, as you'll be embedding video and sound with text (and potentially images).  In a multimedia, online world, being able to embed audio and video is an important part of composing for the web.


The Requirements

Your online portfolio will, at a minimum, include...

1. A personal statement, which could include...
• a brief description of your academic background,
• background information on the course,
• how your work in the class meshes with your professional goals.
  
2. Descriptions of each project (blog, A/V, audio) and the work you did, personally, to create each.
3. Your A/V Project as an embedded video.
• I've discussed with a few of you that your video might include information that's too controversial to put online.  Please contact me if that's the case.  We can either edit your videos a bit or, worst case, include pictures in its place.  Again, contact me regarding these videos.  Do not waste time editing before speaking with me.
  
4. Your podcast as an embedded audio file.  (Remember to describe your own commercial.)
   
5. A link to another student's portfolio who does not yet have a link.  (This will create a chain of links.  It's all about the SEO.)
   

There are many ways to accomplish this.  You're can create one page for all of your information, or you can create two to three pages to host 1.) your A/V project, 2.) your podcast project, and 3.) a general resume or personal statement on their own pages.


Hosting Options

You're going to need a place to put this information.  For our class discussion, we're going to use YouTube for our A/V projects, our Unity webspace for audio, and Blogger's Pages feature for our web pages.

Follow this post from the Blogger Buzz blog and this page from Google Support to learn how to add and edit [fairly] static web pages to your blog site.

If you choose to have a single page, please ensure that each page has some good information about your project around each -- what were your goals, etc.

Once you're done, double check your Blogger "Design" tab to see if the Pages widget is where you want it.  You can also edit the way the links appear in your design.


File Hosting: Video on YouTube

You will have at least two files to have hosted on these pages, your video and your podcast.  Even after creating pages in your blog, you're going to need somewhere to put these often fairly large files.

The easiest place to put your video is YouTube, for a few reasons.

1. It's free.
2. The site will likely host your file longer than your NCSU account will be active.  (That is, your YouTube video will stay up after you graduate!)
3. YouTube allows you to upload videos up to two gigabytes in size!
4. It compresses your movie for you after uploading.

This page assumes you have a YouTube account.  If you do, navigate to YouTube.com in your browser and ensure that you're logged in.  Then go to the YouTube video upload page and upload your video.  If you do not have access to your video any more, well, shame!  Contact your instructor for a new copy.

Once you've uploaded your video, grab its "embed" code.  Copy this into your clipboard and go to your Blogger Page.

Ensure that you're in Posting, Edit Pages, Edit HTML mode (see screenshot).  Paste in the embed code, and click Publish Page.  Done!


File Hosting: Audio on your Unity Webspace

You can also place files on your NCSU web account.  Instructions on setting your web space up can be found here (to activate your account, if you haven't).  The application you'll need to move files from your [Windows] computer to your web space can be found here.

Your NCSU web space will have a URL in the following form:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wrbailey
(where "wrbailey" will be replaced by your unity login)

Follow these instructions to upload your mp3 file.

Note that your Unity webspace is often removed (or access online denied) once you've moved on from NCSU.  You might consider hosting the file on Amazon Web Services, a friend's website if they pay for dedicated space, or consider turning the file into a YouTube upload by putting the audio under a still image in Movie Maker.

To embed the file in a player on your page like the one below, follow these instructions.