Online Portfolios

At Poynter Online, Chip Scanlon comments on the world of online resumes and portfolios in The World Wide Resume: Posting Your Clips Online. Posting a resume online was one of my first uses of the World Wide Web (you can see the last version of that effort archived). From a British professor, I acquired software that more or less interfaced with Microsoft Word to create a web page. A year later Netscape released the "Composer" component of its suite that included the first useful browser, Navigator. I also learned web page composition with Home Page (I think that was the name of a program for Apple computers) as part of my employment with a school district. Composing in HTML code was the standard until I decided to get serious about web design. That introduced me to the Big Boys, MS Front Page and Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Now I couldn't survive without Macromedia products. The best model for an online portfolio of writing still eludes me. My first attempt (here) includes a downloadable text file, .JPG images and a scrolling DIV of text. Downloadable files in .PDF format is a possibility, as are .EXE files that would open in a browser, although I have the suspicion that editors want to see the stories right away. Some people construct the entire article as an image, attempting to prevent plagiarism, but that risks making the text unreadable. One example I recently reviewed is Bonnie Boots' method. I'm still pondering. It's a lot of work to scan paper copies, clean up the image, run OCR and make corrections, and convert the file into another format for inclusion with a website. [writers' portfolios]

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