Senior Final Blog Post

My Years Here

"Baseball, How I met your Mother, Some Web, Cheeto, and food." - Caitlyn Cottrill, on my 4 years in eComm.

Man it's been a wild ride.  Coming into the program, I was going to do animation.  Somewhere along the lines I was convinced to do Web and I couldn't be happier.  I can apply what i learned to life more than animation.  Its been fun.

Senior Project Blog Post

Senior Project

My project was to maintain and write a sports blog, Stepek Sports Blog to be specific.  I was hoping to get 1 or 2 posts out a week and I believe I have about 4 or 5 completely finished ones.  The first few are about the March Madness tournament and after that it's all baseball.

Process

The process is basically this;
                    1) Pick a topic to write about, say like my Oakland A's monthly report
                    2) Watch the appropriate game or games and gather stats and comments
                    3) Write the blog by mashing together the stats and comments

Conclusion

I learned that the hardest thing about writing a blog is coming up with something to blog about.  That was my biggest problem this semester.  I love baseball and I love talking about it but narrowing down my thoughts to find something to write about was tough.  I would start off each day watching a game with a team I kind of had an idea with and it would just drop out and I would lose it.

Link: https://tallguystepek.wixsite.com/stepek-sports-blog

Week of 5/1/17 - 5/5/17 Senior Project Blog

This week I've been working on my end of the month A's report, which is taking longer than usual.  While writing it, I've been watching a lot of baseball which makes it look like I'm not doing anything but I am.  I really want to start writing series previews for the A's and try to let my readers in on my opinions and thoughts and predictions on each series.  It'll be a lot of work and I don't have much time left unfortunately but it's worth a shot.

Week of 4/23/17 - 4/26/17 Senior Project Blog

This week I really didn't work on a blog.  I am planning to write a post on the Oakland Athletics and their month of April and my opinions on that.  To prepare for this, i've been watching a lot of baseball.  Shocker, right?  While I have been keeping a eye on the A's, in class I have been working on my new index site and updating that for the senior show.  I added a picture of my, taken by Allyson, and I added images to my links.  I rewrote my little blurb about myself too.

Week of 3/20/17 - 3/24/17 Senior Project Blog

So this week I continued to tweak my blog's design including the colors, layout, and small changes to the code to do things that I couldn't do in the editor.  I also took time to look up some tips about how to write good sports blogs.  I wrote about the Sweet 16 and i had my predictions out.  Not very accurate

Week of 3/3/17 - 3/10/17 Senior Project Blog

"My name is Brendan Stepek and I love sports more then anything in the world. So I am starting a gosh dang blog about it. It is going to be so freaking interesting that you will wait on the edge of your seat for me to post another post about all these wonderful teams that I love to watch. Oh and by the way the Royals are my favorite team on the whole entire earth, they are so so so much better then the Athletics, like there is no comparison. Anyway I am going to be telling you all about these games and all that stuff, and I hope you like it. bye."

- Allyson Chitwood, 2017

Semester 1 Final Blog Post

          

          Semester 1 was an interesting semester for sure.  I was gone a lot more than I planned on being gone and that really put me back on a lot of the projects as opposed to the focusing problems I've had in the past.

          The first real project was the MCML branding project.  With the random animal, numbers, letters, and element I was given I created a fictional baseball team called the Mercury City Mountain Lions (as seen in the first and last picture).  I was in Seattle for the back end of the project so I didn't get the actual website finished but the stats, logos, uniforms, and banner images are all completed.  I plan to finish it one day.  Fingers crossed.  For the uniforms I created a white home uni, an away grey, and three alternates; one red, one black, and one blue (as seen above).  I liked this project because it really gave me the freedom to pull baseball into this.

         I also got a divorce.