Reflective Blog Post on What is a File?

This week, yet again, I learned something about files that I previously had little to no knowledge of. We read about files as a metaphor for the data on a computer, different types of files, a plain text as a special type of file, and editing and viewing plain text files. I’ll be honest after reading the whole ‘What is a File?’ reading, I was still kinda confused. There was so much information covered I felt like I couldn’t take it all in. But, it all got better with the hands-on activity this week. Reading this and spending time learning how to actually create the file’s helped so much, guess I’m learning that I am a do it type of learner!

So, after I created some files and had a better understanding of the material I went on a search for an artifact that I can use to help illustrate my understanding of files! First, I went to one of my favorite blogger’s websites to see what I could find. I right-clicked and then hit inspect to pull up information about the page. When nothing I recognized came up there, I went to a different page with a post to get information about it. When this didn’t work I right-clicked again and this time clicked view page source instead of inspect and was able to get much more information.

There I was able to see the different types of files that had been added and the text. There were multiple .jpegs that you could click on and see separately. That looks like this: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/569c534b40667a727eea5fed/57170a8df85082783bfba736/5eef15f5c493904cf7dd2f09/1597437010814/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-08-14%2Bat%2B2.24.59%2BPM.jpg?format=1500w

There was also a section that resembled one of the images in the reading of the “dictionary using JSON”. Once you begin scrolling down you are able to see spots of Plaintext but overall it appears that it is all in HTML code. I am surprised because I would not have expected this because her blog is on Squarespace which is a more template ready blog space.

I think overall her blog is effective because of the way it is organized. You can see the HTML code and Plaintext making an effective mix of both. However, I am assuming that she did not code the whole website herself and that Squarespace does it automatically because doing HTML for the whole website would be incredibly time consuming.

I hope that this has made sense because being honest I am still trying to grasp the material. While the hands-on activity definitely helped, I feel like it made me more able to do it myself and less able to talk about it. Talking about coding and things related is still very hard for me even though I find it incredibly interesting. I am hoping as we continue in this class I become better at it and my reflective posts become more in depth and better worded.

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