Author Archives: Heather Mulhern

My first idea for a website topic is to make a professional/portfolio website that shows my work as a writer and my other publishing related skills.

The goal would be to establish myself as a writer and begin building a platform so that when I have finished my novel and polished it and am trying to get it published, I will already have a base and maybe even a small following of people who are interested in reading it. This portfolio would display not only my skills as a writer, but also other related skills that a potential employer might be interested—editing (especially substantive), and design.

While I’m very happy sharing my writing with friends, peers, and family who show interest in it. I don’t know if I have any stories or excerpts that I feel are finished and polished enough to put where everyone can see them. Maybe I could post excerpts of current projects that I am working on and am especially pleased with. But then I there’s the nagging concern that anyone on the web can read it and that someone could take my idea, before I’ve succeeded in getting it published.

So then I started thinking about the other things besides writing that I am passionate about and would enjoy sharing with the web. I thought of doing an urban biking blog, where I would give people tips about biking in the city and share good bike routes and scenic rides in Boston.

But then I thought, that would be great if I were making it in Spring, but “Winter is coming.” I won’t want to be exploring new places when it gets cold, I’ll only be biking the route from my apartment to school and from school to my apartment and I’m sure my dad would love it if I published my daily bike route for the world to see.

Then I thought, I like making handmade journals for people and hand-binding books. I could make a website about that, that is part tutorial and part displaying the journals I’ve made people. But out of the ten or so journals I’ve made for friends and family, I gave away more than half without taking photos and I really don’t have the time to make anymore.

Well, what am I passionate about besides writing that I will be doing anyways this semester? I will be making bread, soup, and drinking tea. I’ve been wanting to get into blending teas. Making a cup or pot of tea takes less time than baking bread or making soup. Where as I will likely make soup once a week and bread once every two weeks, I’ll be drinking tea every day. Especially since it will be getting cold and since making tea is part of my writing process and I am and will be needing to write a lot this semester.

So I could create a website about tea providing the perspective of a tea lover, who has been drinking tea all her life, but is interested delving deeper to learn more about tea and try blending it. I would stock my shelf with a variety of teas, I love trying new teas and am limping along on the few teas that a friend gave me over the summer—the shelf needs restocking. I would review the teas by themselves and think about which flavor combinations might be good together. I might include reviews of local teashops and places that sell loose-leaf teas. My audience would be the casual tea lover and the tea fanatic and those that love making a pot of tea to share with friends on a cold winter day, although probably not the tea expert.

A Tea Addict’s Journal is a tea blog that takes tea very seriously. The writer writes with deft expertise about a type of tea, puerh, that I don’t think I’ve tried yet. Reading a couple of posts, I learned much that I did not previously know about tea. Not being such an expert, mine would document an exploration. This site is organized by a word-cloud of the tags. I’d rather organize mine around categories of types of tea and the seasons or occasions the tea is best suited for.

Teaviews: Reviews of the world’s finest teas is a website that has thousands of reviews published by a team of reviewers. In contrast with the more personal blog of the tea addict about, this website has way too many categories. It probably has a lot more content, but it lacks in organization. The categories could be in categories. It has a few ads in the top right corner, and the layout isn’t very visually appealing. I haven’t wanted to look at it longer to assess the actual content. With the ads in the corner, the narrow review column and really long list of categories to the side that you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see them all, it’s too busy for me to be enticed into reading it.

In contrast Steepster is an online community where people from the online community can post reviews. It is easy to search for a particular tea or to see all the reviews of chai teas, or the top reviews of all types of tea. A nice simple layout and well categorized, although it lacks the personal connection of a tea blog.

I still might be interested in doing a portfolio, because I do want to have one, but I’m really liking the tea exploration idea right now.