Posts Tagged ‘english’

Some old writings of mine (that I and others?! read)

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

This evening I was clicking around various things on my computer and ended up reading some old writings for 11th and 12th grade English class. This eventually led to perusal of the two English “portfolio” sites I had to make in high school (or rather, I had to make something with foo-content on the web, and whereas most people just put up a pbwiki, I spent hours playing with HTML and CSS … because it was a good excuse to).

They are located at

http://wip.donaldguy.com (11th grade “works in progress page”, updated in late 12th grade as part of portfolio project, collection of essays and such from 9th-12th grade with some self-analysis) and

http://english.donaldguy.com (12 grade portfolio site, contains mostly reflection on my high school experience, some select pieces from the above with commentary/rewrites, a few new pieces)

It is always interesting to peruse the writings of the person you once were, and this was no exception. I don’t really have much to say about them right now, other than … it’s just interesting. Since a lot of the writing (more on the second) had to be about myself… it’s interesting to look at both what I said and how I said it. There’s a certain arrogance certainly. And also a certain certainty of purpose that I wish I could recapture. Oh well. In any case, I invite you to look through both of them and make comments here about what is there, here or by email/zephyr/etc.

It’s also interesting to compare the two as websites beyond their content: looking at the quality and motivation of their design, layout, etc. And contrast that with a more recent web project of mine like the work I did on http://myquestforcollege.com.

I thought an interesting self-analytic pursuit for a Sunday evening.

Irrelevantly:

Fun facts: For a reason I can’t, for the life of me, figure out, if you google Donald Guy, the fourth result is my 12th grade essay ostensibly on Merry Shelly’s Frankenstein titled “the Dangers of Passion” which somehow ends up being about nuclear proliferation and the danger of creation without oversight. … No, I don’t know either.

In general, wip.donaldguy.com gets a confusingly high amount of traffic. This year-to-date 8777 pages have been loaded off of it. Not mostly me, I assure you. Over its lifetime it has averaged 55 unique hits per day.

Looking at the referrer report of this months’ stats (something I assure you I don’t do normally, but was doing cause of this entry), I discovered that my analysis of lincoln’s second inaugural address is linked to from this (admittedly rather long) guide for 6th grade language arts teachers to “use the internet effectively”. Fuck if I know.

The internet is weird and so am I,

~Donald Guy