Beyond Bounds Blog

BeyondBounds.org is getting a make-over. For the last month I have been familiarizing myself with WordPress and basic blogging techniques and understanding. I’m finally ready to launch this blog, so over the next couple of weeks I’ll be working hard on re-designing, re-focusing, and finally launching this site.

Design:

I’m completely overhauling this blog. I’m learning XHMTL and CSS as well as Photoshop and photography. My current theme is just a WordPress that someone else created, Inove, but it’s not fit for what I want to do with this site. I’m going to completely customize my own site to fit my needs and personality.

If you are interesting in blogging yourself, you can use the resources at the bottom to learn how to make your own custom WordPress theme and learn some basic coding. It’s not very hard; most people out there should have no problem. If you have some specific goals for your blog or are artistic, I’d suggest giving it a shot.

Blogging is a great tool while you are abroad. A lot of people would love to learn about your travels or experiences and a blog is the perfect flexible medium that allows you to at least tell your family that you’re ok, or for your friends to keep up with which City you’re in. I’d say it’s even better than a myspace or facebook for posting pictures, because there is more customizability; you can more easily attach pictures to text or a story. I would hope that everyone interested in international or multicultural subjects should at least read blogs – they are the most personal way of learning. Usually blogs are straight forward and cut out the media or political screenings.

Media:

I’ve always felt that words are not enough to express what I want to here. This blog is about discovering the world and other cultures and that should be done not only with descriptions, but with media as well, so you can not only contemplate the meaning but also feel it. Pictures alone would not offer enough, as you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at and everyone would have different interpretations depending on their own background, but words are not enough either as it’s nearly impossible to picture what you’ve never experienced before.

Imagine if I wanted to express an alien encounter to the world. I could tell you about all of the tentacles and the large fangs and its cute little laugh and physique, but different people will still picture different aliens in their head. Words are not always the best tool –it could be a picture, video, or audio. While your message is the most important aspect of communication, the way you express it – the medium – can really change the way others perceive that message. Communication has always run into the problem “the medium is the message.” I’ve already run into this and hope to make it less of a problem with this new adjustment.

I just bought the camera above in my attempt to spice up this site. It’s a Nikon D60. I got it for $3660 RMB in Beijing. It’s not professional – I’m nowhere near that level and a professional camera would be too much for what I want to do. It is a semi-professional camera for the newbie (me) that is easy to use and has plenty of functionality to keep up with me as I improve. I’ll be using this guy to cover this place with pictures of my adventures and things of importance.

I plan on adding video and audio to the site later, but those in most cases are luxuries that are tough to incorporate into a blog, so I’ll add them later down the road.

A New Direction:

I took it to heart when pro-bloggers said “you need to write timeless content” in order to ensure that your blogs posts will be relevant in the future. This is in contrast to simply commenting on the news, which would make your content irrelevant the day after you posted it. I took this to an extreme and began writing only with large ideas, such as my “acceptance vs tolerance” article and ”do what you love”. I really believe in what I said, but limiting myself only to these topics has really strayed from my goal.

My goal for this blog is to increase the world’s knowledge and acceptance of other cultures and nations. This can be done by helping people travel or learn another language, but it can also be done simply by showing the world another culture in an easy to understand way. Whether my content is helpful to people 1000 years from now is irrelevant if different cultures and nations don’t learn to accept each other and blow the world up in the next 50 years.

From now on I will be mixing my content between experience and knowledge. Experience will compromise of things that I find interesting and think others will too; it could be food, a custom, a place, a person, or a film. These will be things that you could go and experience yourself to enrich your life and perspective. Knowledge will compromise things that I have learned in my travels. This could be tips on traveling, living abroad (in whatever country), learning a new language etc, cultural comparisons, or even philosophical writings.

Expressing myself:

The point of this whole makeover is to align my blog closer to my passions. This month I enjoyed blogging and messing around with WordPress, but I felt that there was something off. Memorized formulas for success only work for robots, not those of us who have to find motivation and are creative beings. I am no longer going to confine myself to a certain type of content because I am told that it will benefit my blog traffic numbers down the road, but instead open up completely to use this blog as a tool for true self-expression. I won’t turn this into a journal that tallies what I did everyday, but rather I’m going to share everything of value that I can offer through my unique experiences and insight.

I hope to have it up within the next couple of weeks.  Look out for my new site layout!  This is exciting.

Resources:

I’m going through a few step by step tutorials in web design.  I suggest checking out the following:

At Entheosweb you will find Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and other web design tutorials that are extremely helpful.

Developer Tutorials offers a ton of resources for designing and coding. I haven’t learned quite enough yet to be able to utilize this particular tutorial, but I’m confident that it will be useful soon.

ThemeTation has a really nice full tutorial including Photoshop and coding. Their own website is very simple and clean, and probably something that you should be able to design and code within a couple of weeks.

Wpdesigner.com has the most useful tutorial that I’ve seen yet, as it is geared at those who really don’t know ANYTHING about web design. It’s really interesting that this blog hasn’t been updated in nearly a year, and yet it’s still at the top of google search. What a great hands-free money making machine.

Sitepoint is a unique site that offers design tips from both the technical and the artistic sides. On page 3 you’ll find tips about the “golden rule” and “the rule of thirds.”

w3schools is a good resource for any extra help you might need with coding.

Steve Pavlina.com is a personal development blog, but he also covers blogging in a few articles. This site is the one that got me into blogging in the first place, so I couldn’t leave this out for those out there who might be interested. Check out this and this. You might stay and check out some of his personal development articles as well, they changed my life and might change yours. 