Devolution

06Jan09

As I’ve sat in front of my computer for the last week and a half, fiddling around with my new copy of Dreamweaver, I came to a sad realization.

I let myself become a coding dinosaur.

Seriously. I’ve devolved.

Oh, I kept up on the basics of WYSIWYG designing–my various jobs on campus have required a lot of work with Microsoft Frontpage (ick, I know). I spent my time focusing on trying to save the Alumni Web site from jumbled and fractured navigation and themes,  and thought that was enough.

It wasn’t.

At graduation from high school four years ago, I was proficient in HTML, programming with Visual Basic, had played with GIF Animator, and delved into a number of other designing programs. Now? The thought of opening most of those programs evokes a depressing daydream of sitting in front of a split screen computer for hours, half on the program itself, half on the help menu, just trying to remember the basics. Not a pleasant thought.

I’ve got the basic basics of HTML back  down and I’m getting the hang of CSS. In a month or so I’ll probably be back up to being proficient.

But the point is that I’m playing catch-up instead of moving forward. And it’s not just a whimsy thing that I forgot. These are things that I’m going to need if I want to be competitive in the changing market of journalism. Plus a lot of  other stuff that I’ll have to talk about another time.

So… my first resolution for the new year is to integrate Web work into my daily (well, near daily) life so that the skills don’t get so rusty again.

Part of that is going to be dedicated to hand-coding my first Web site from scratch. Hopefully I’ll have that up and running by May. Seems like a lot of time, but like I said, I am relearning all of this at a semi-painfully slow pace and I have big plans for the big reveal.

Here’s to pulling through.

Filed under: Journalism, Life   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: coding, CSS, HTML, Journalism, musings