Work in Progress by Laura N. '09

So. I decided that I needed a new banner.

Alright, so that’s a lie. Ben decided for me that I needed a new banner. See, when Ben sets up the original blog for us, it has a “default banner” that says “replace this ASAP, you slacker.” Well, I got tired of being called a slacker every time I looked at my page, but I have no one around to help me make a new banner. It will include a picture of your truly, so you can all see how gorgeous I really am in real life. As you probably know, it’s kind of hard to take a picture of yourself, and the people I live with (known collectively as my family) have all been very busy lately. So I decided to pull a Mitra and put up a really simple temporary design for the time being. So I made the very simple banner you see above.

The next step was to upload it. Any images we bloggers post here need to be hosted in our Athena lockers. All MIT students get Athena accounts, which allow you to have your @mit.edu email as well as some server space with MIT. This space is known as your Athena locker. So Ben sent me a link with info about how to upload to this Athena locker, only Ben is a crazy Mac user and my parents (who buy the computers we use) would be so totally confused by the concept of a different kind of OS that they always stick to Windows. So Ben’s help didn’t really work.

So after searching unsuccessfully for similar info about Windows, I stumbled across this program called Filezilla, which supposedly allows you to upload files securely. So I downloaded it and started trying it out.

I had no instructions, but I figured hey, I got into MIT, how hard can it be? I totally know what FTP is (file transfer protocol) and I think I might have used it once before, so let’s see what I can come up with. Well, after hours of hard work and blundering around without a clue as to what I was doing, I finally….

…gave up and hosted the image on http://photobucket.com/

*hangs head in shame*

But never fear! This is only a temporary solution. I am still working on the problem and once I figure it out, I will be sure to post an informative entry for you other clueless ’09ers.

Right. So, just a note- the rest of the design is also a work in progress. I’ll be working on the other templates in my spare time over the next few days, so if you ever load this page and the font is some hideous shade of purple or something, don’t be alarmed. It’s only on accident.

Fortunately, I actually do know what I’m doing when it comes to html and css, so I’m very much looking forward to this part of the project.

Well, I need to leave for work in about 10 minutes, so here’s one last thing to keep you busy: take the MIT blogger survey. I did. =)