Coding from Scratch

Last week I used HTML for the first time to create my Journalism 309 Homepage. The week before I didn't know what "HTML" stood for, turns out it means HyperText Markup Language. Like learning French, using HTML was something I'd always planned to do but never would, so I'm glad Annenberg required it.

Since this page is fairly simple, it was pretty fun and easy to do. The hardest part was locating files using the FTP( file transfer protocol, I learned that too) Filezilla, which I downloaded from the free software available at USC ITS. I also had a few problems with broken file links when I tried to upload my picture but once I figured out the mechanics of Filezilla it was quite easy. The whole page took me about an hour and half to complete, including playing with the colors and fonts. After I got the hang of it, trying new things became a little addicting.

This week the class assignment was to create this blog, which you are obviously reading. I have to say it was much easier that using HTML. Instead of figuring out coding and how to use Filezilla, I spent most of my time on the content and layout. While creating a blog with blogger's template was a lot faster than coding my own page, it doesn't give me the same amount of freedom because the templates are more limiting in terms of design. Even thought I don't know how to create anything fancy with coding, I liked knowing that it was a possibility. However, if you want to be able to post information as quickly as possible and you're not that concerned with design creativity, an online blog site is probably much more efficient that coding a page.

Even though I probably won't be coding pages for a living I think I definitely gained an important piece of industry knowledge. The future of journalism is online, knowing how to use online outlets is important if I want to survive in the field. I like knowing that if I had to, I could create a web page from scratch. And there are other perks... Who knew learning about HTML would be good for my social life, but it seems to have brought me and my techie friends closer together. They think I'm one step closer to joining their world-I doubt it, it's not like I'm counting in binary or anything.