Exegenis

In building a simple blog based upon film reviews and thoughts about the industry, I considered my experience with blogs in the past and how best to shape my web presence as to convey the message and tone I wanted. Having never studied film and without an educated knowledge of formal reviewing (short of watching David and Margaret and reading Empire) I knew that the best approach would be a casual one, incorporating humour and sharing my own experience as opposed to breaking down the construction of a particular piece.

I chose Blogger as the host for my central node for a variety of reasons, it syncs up with my Google account which is convenient, there is already a large network which encourages aimlessly browsing through blogs and its simple to set-up and use. But the largest influence on my choice was being aware of my own predispositions upon reaching any blog. In choosing Blogger over nearest competitor Wordpress I chose a more leisure orientated blog, in my experience Wordpress is more often facilitated to express a professional opinion, I didn't want to give that impression. By choosing a platform which a specific group of content generating users, I helped influence the type of people accessing the blog and the impression they got of it.

The next important decision in shaping my impression people got of my web presence was choosing the layout of my blog. The simple Harbour layout by Douglas Bowman was the most appealing to my intentions, it was clear and yet decorative enough to show the site was arts related. I didn't want the page to be cluttered with too many distracting widgets so I chose the ones related to my external nodes and a trailer of the day one to tie in with the movie theme. I wanted my page to be rich in links throughout the text and for that not to interrupt with quickly reading the post if the reader doesn't have time or doesn't need to follow the links. Choosing the Harbour layout was important in achieving that because of the subtle difference in text colour between a link and regular content. Lots of embedded links helps to solidify the casual browsing feel I wanted the blog to give off, but if they are too “loud” on the page it distracts from the content.

I chose the social networking tools Delicious, Twitter and Digg for my contributing nodes because they all encourage the frequent short browsing that West Coast Cinema was meant to be a part of. I can link to various stories or trailers I might want to share on a smaller scale and get a good idea of general public consensus through the comment at each of these sites.