A soft relaunch

So yeah … hello!

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Welcome to my blog – a relaunched one. My name is Haaris Qureshi. At the moment I am studying an MA in International Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle University – as well as finishing my dissertation from my previous MA in Film: Theory and Practice, and I’m a graduate of the same university in Computing Science.

So what is this site? There’s a long answer and a short answer.

The short answer

As above – simply it’s my blog. I’m planning on using it for two things.

1. General personal blogging – when I want to express something about the world in longform, where it would be too verbose for Twitter and I want to reach a wider audience than my Facebook. (I also have a Tumblr – but I imagine I’ll mainly use that for fandom stuff, mostly reblogging really …).
2. Independent journalism – I mostly identify as a videojournalist. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous. But other than being an amateur and independent filmmaker, I enjoy vlogging and – at it’s core, I like documenting the world through moving images. And I’m more interested in capturing events, as they happen, from the trivial to the major. So I suppose that makes me a vlogger moving into fledgling videojournalism? But – while I like to spend most of my time with multimedia, I don’t want to neglect written journalism. In my secondary school I was the struggling editor of the student magazine (struggling because no one ever seemed to want to write for it, despite turning up to occasional meetings), and since coming to Newcastle University, I have written for The Courier, which I am now the Gaming sub-editor for. And more to the point, I am studying journalism as a degree, and it’s become very apparent to me (not that I discounted it before) that practicing written journalism is important to me to make sure I understand how to tell a story – even if I primarily focus on telling it through video, the principles will be the same. So while I might currently be writing for the student newspaper, as well as being a volunteer correspondent for hyperlocal news website JesmondLocal, it’s very likely I will be practicing journalism independently. And if and when I do, it will find a home here (unless … you know, I get really lucky, manage to break a really impressive story, in which case, obviously I’m going to sell it! – but that’s a career aspiration at the moment … you never know though …). In fact, as part of my degree, I have to create a multimedia piece, and host it on a WordPress. The usual expectation is to set up a domain.wordpress.com site, that most students will never do anything with (which is fine) – but I already had this site, I had been meaning to kick it off for ages, so this coursework has given me the motivation to do just that.

To kinda make it less empty, I imported my old content from my old Blogger site – it turns out I only really blogged on it four times – the rest of the content was autoposts from Formsprings (if you’re the right age to remember that rend) which I have mercifully hidden. So if you do go looking at the older four posts, please keep in mind the latest one was written five years ago, and all the ones prior when I was a schoolkid. I was a different person then (well, a child). (Edit: I have now since (manually, and painfully) added every public vlog I have ever written to this site … pros: hidden my kinda-embarassing-pre-2015 blogs; cons: added my pre-2015 vlogs, which are arguably more embarassing …)

At the moment, my site looks like this:

It may massively change, so this soft relaunch is a very trepidatious one. As to why that is the case … well that’s the long answer, so if you want to leave, now is your chance.

The long answer

I always wanted my own website. Just … mainly because why not. The Internet is and always has been this wonderful thing. Even now, with all the attempts by agencies, governments, and corporations to control it, and in some ways succeeding, I still believe the World Wide Web is one of the few truly free places. Sure, certain countries and governments can restrict local access, but as an entity, the Internet is an international infrastructure above all that. And the fact I can create an online presence, a mark, with very little effort, always amazed me.

I have a background and a very constant interest in technology. Even as I have moved more from being into the idea of computer science into broadcasting, I always am eager to learn about the tech that makes it tick. And web design is one of the most obvious areas of multimedia which sits quite neatly between IT/computing science (I am always keen to stress they are not the same thing) and multimedia/publishing.

I remember my first foray into web design … my Matmice site. Sadly nothing remains of the hours I spent building a network of sites (you had to make a new account for every website you wanted – this was early 2000s internet, the idea of user generated content was barely a thing back then, so developing infrastructures to support that was very in its infancy). But from there, I moved onto using other website providers – I can no longer remember what, until roughly seven years ago (likely during my first year as an UG comp sci student) I decided I was going to build my own website from scratch. After all, I did know HTML, and I was learning CSS as one of my modules. So I made a start on a site and built a very basic one – my plan was to develop the skeleton, then develop and develop it, adding new tech and multimedia as I went on.

Unfortunately, I only got as far as a skeleton of a few pages – I got too busy. I am always too busy. Outside of my academia, I throw myself into student activities – societies, student media, clubs, volunteering projects. I was on the committee of plenty of student groups, including running the student TV station. And even outside that, I got involved in the occasional thing. And then a few years ago, I joined St. John Ambulance as a first responder.

Oh and I also got very mentally ill, and the thing about being mentally ill you don’t realise if you’re not is it’s exhausting and you just want to sleep all the time.

Lets just say, developing the website wasn’t ever going to happen if I continued making it by hand. But I needed a website. I was becoming comfortable with the idea I wanted to do media work (whether that was in film, broadcast or journalism) – and that included independent freelance work. And so I needed to market myself. I needed to have a presentable website. So eventually I shelved my handmade site (it still technically exists on this domain as a subdirectory, although all the links and CSS will have broken in the migration from the index), and installed WordPress.

This is a WordPress self-hosted site (rather than a WordPress.com site). I downloaded the open source code, which I host on a server an domain I pay for. So I still own all the content, which I back up to my own computer (this is important, I feel, if you’re serious about having a website, and not just mucking around – if you don’t have local files, you’re at the mercy of your hosting provider who can just at any point wipe everything, and you’re left without the ability to just go somewhere else and go live where you left off). But instead of coding a website from scratch, I pick some templates, use the WordPress UI and … can focus on the content. Which is the main thing.

But … I am keen for this to not feel like just a WordPress site. I want it to feel like a me site. No disrespect to WordPress (I don’t think), but the more I can disguise that’s what I’ve done, the more I feel that will be the case (I realise I am undermining that by explaining the backend in my literal first post but … oh well). I don’t want to just download a template and leave it like that, because then it’s not a unique site, it’s the same as someone else’s. But I also don’t want to just do a bit of recolouring and then leave it like that. Fortunately, the art of website design means there are strong conventions, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel of what works for a website design to feel individual. I just need to have enough customisation.

Unfortunately, as I am learning, WordPress is hit and miss with how easy it is to do that … and it seems to depend on basically what Theme template you start off with. And I guess that’s where most of the work is – because you don’t know how easy it is to get what you want until you actually do it all, and then finish it … and then you realise the template you chose, doesn’t fit. Then you have to start from scratch (in the appearance at least – the good thing about WordPress is the content will remain). Which by this point of this first being published, has happened once. It might happen again.

I’m not sold on the current template. I prefer it to the last, it does feel more like me – but it also feels like an early 2000s Bloggeresque site. Not at all modern. Hmm.

Also, while I am experienced in media – I am not a designer, except when I am forced to be. Colour palettes and aesthetics are stuff I have to work at … and I think I am passable. I am certainly not unskilled with UI design, in fact it’s what I was best at during my UG degree – but I think there’s a small canyon between between being a software UI developer and working on creating a visual static experience that I would need help crossing – it’s the reason my artistic skills end with UI or motion graphics, and I don’t go into painting or photography. If that all makes sense.

The other thing I’ve done with my site is split it up into identities – my site is actually albusvia.uk, which at this time is faithfully sitting as a Coming Soon page … someone undermined by the fact this subdomain and my other one is very much accessible … I have this subdomain to use as my blog (as explained above), and another subdomain at squishivision.albusvia.uk, to use for what I guess is media analysis – at the moment film and TV ‘reviews’ (mostly just reactions and thoughts I have whilst or after watching something, because actually analysing something takes time, which I do not have, but when I do and when I have, I occasionally write something more substantive) – as well as my video game streams. That website is live (maybe it shouldn’t be), but completely unreadable, as I have not yet finished wrangling the template. I guess my plan is to make another subdomain for my independent film work – to both showcase my films and to advertise my services as a filmmaker/videographer, and then use my main domain as a nexus. The beauty of self-hosting is I can have as many websites as I want (I think? Guess we’ll find out …), and as I don’t mind them all linking to my one Albus Via brand, they can all be subdomains. (Should I explain the Albus Via thing? Or leave that to later?).

Anyway … this was a late night blog, to basically break off from the past stuff and start with the new – if for no other reason than in about a months time someone leading my multimedia news module is going to come on this website to read a blog post, and may or may not get curious about the previous posts … and if that happens, I’d like there to be some kind of buffer between Haaris’ writings of 2021 and Haaris’ writing pre-2015.

And hey, you never know, maybe if I maintain this site, I’ll attract some traffic.

In which case, they’ll need that buffer too.

Thanks for reading

~ Squishi