Figuring out this interweb thing

Last week our Journalism 309 class was assigned to create our own USC web spaces. I thought the task would be fairly straightforward, but perhaps I underestimated my ability to make everything regarding computers far more difficult than it needs to be.

Setting up the webspace and using PuTTY was easy enough, and changing the actual HTML tags wasn't so bad. But using the FTP was a nightmare. For some reason, my preview page looked completely fine when I opened it in Firefox. But when I uploaded it and tried to visit it, it was a bunch of indecipherable characters. Needless to say, I was very confused and frustrated.

It turns out I was using the wrong text editor when I was changing the HTML. I didn't know that something that simple could so drastically alter the overall effect. The instructions could have been a little clearer, but I should have known better as well. All in all, I'd like to think the end product turned out pretty well.

Still, I'm very happy to be moving on to blogger and other non-HTML work. This seems a lot more straightforward and I'm more comfortable using a basic CMS than I am working with HTML. I'm going to be blogging soon for The National Football Post, so I hope to use some of the skills I learn in this class when I start blogging. I'd imagine that the CMS used on that website might be a little bit more complicated, but I'll try to figure it out along the way. That's what I've been doing with blogger, and it seems to be going pretty well so far.