Week 5 BGI Posting

Before the Elluminate session, create a new blog post in your personal learning journal with information and thoughts about your new BGI Beat blog:
  • What did you decide to be your beat?
  • What did you name your blog? What is the URL?
  • What issues did you have difficulties working through to decide?
  • What personal branding or blog branding issues remain?
  • Do you want to get a dedicated domain address for your blog (as opposed to blogspot.com)?
After some thought on my interests and expertise, I decided to aim my blog towards high end green building practices. Currently I hold a position in which I deal strictly with weatherization home retrofits. While this market relates and often overlaps the "green building" industry, it is still considered seperate. For me, this gave me a chance to not only work with my current knowledge in the green building and weatherization industry, but allowed me to grow in my knowledge and expertise.

In the end, I ended up calling my blog "Building With Intention". I decided upon this because green building is just that, building with a consideration and intention of many different factors besides profit and production alone. The URL currently is BuildingWithIntention.Blogspot.com.  I've seriously considered moving the blog to a dedicated domain like my personal blog, but have decided to wait upon two things: if I actually build a following to my blog and if I intend on keeping that following beyond this semester. I've currently enjoyed the time I've spent researching and writing on my Building With Intention, but find it a bit redundant and difficult to carry on two blogs at the same time. My personal blog often has information about green building issues, and to split my interests between the two sites has proven to be challenging.

Overall, I've been working fairly hard on both sites trying to polish up the layout, design, links, and pages and align them with my personal brand. The biggest challenge I've had has actually been dealing with is photos to post on my personal blogs photo slider. I needed 5 photos, including one photo of myself. First was the hurdle of finding creative commons licensed photos I could use on my site for the first four, which proved to be difficult. The biggest challenge I've actually found was finding a photo OF MYSELF that would be suitable for the front page of the website. I've come to realize that every picture I do have is falls into a one of three categories: too poor of resolution, wrong orientation (the picture box is 400 x 240 pixels), or I'm wedged in between or next to someone. I've come to the realization that I must not make a interesting photo in high resolution or by myself :)