Two  of Jonathan Harris’ websites,  The Whale Hunt and Balloons of Bhutan, are interesting to compare because their design reflects the different degrees to which Harris finds experiences interactive. Both websites are interactive participatory websites; viewers can choose how the story is presented (i.e. the order of events) but they must choose among events that have been fully predetermined. Both websites also heavily feature still images, but that is where their similarities end.

Harris created The Whale Hunt in 2007 after living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska for nine days. It chronicles his experience participating in the thousand-year-old tradition of the Inupiat whale hunt, beginning with his spending time in the village pre-hunt up to the post-hunt distribution of the harvested meat and blubber to the Barrow community.

The 3,214 photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full image sequence is represented with a heartbeat graph along the bottom of the screen, with each moment’s significance indicated by the photo frequency at that moment during the experience. For example, the faster Harris’ felt his heartbeat thumping, the faster the photo frequency. Viewers can experience the whale hunt narrative as they themselves choose by creating their own interactive experience; Harris gives them four different framework options for interaction: autoplay, mosaic, timeline, and pinwheel. This website does not include any audio.

Balloons of Bhutan tells of Harris’ 2007 journey to Bhutan, where happiness is used to measure socio-economic prosperity. He spent two weeks analysing the happiness of 117 different people by asking them each five questions and then giving them balloons based on their levels of happiness. Along with the introduction page, Harris includes a recorded audio summary of his Bhutanese journey and the reasoning behind it as well as audio of the 117 interviews. He also includes diegetic, foley, and atmospheric sound effects.

Balloons of Bhutan reflects an experience that Harris found much more interactive than his visit to Alaska, and this translates into a more interactive website than The Whale Hunt, which tells the story of an annual event from an outsider’s perspective. This is a good illustration of how a website’s design and content can reflect the designer’s own life experiences.

Today, 29 July, was the first tutorial.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.