Ryan's Writings…at Mason

W3 Schools: A Godsend for Journalists

Learning coding is like learning Arabic when you’re a monolingual English-speaking American.

It’s hard.

Just the names of coding make the average journalism student cringe; HTML, CSS, XML, PHP, ASP and SQL. And probably because they figured us liberal arts people couldn’t take anymore acronyms, they created JavaScript.

And even though many college-aged students grew up in the digital age where we can’t last a day without Internet access, let alone a regular cell phone, we still don’t know the basics of a website.

We learn keyboarding and how to search on Google and use Microsoft Office programs, but we don’t learn that <b> means bold or that colors are represented like #7FFFD4 (this is the code for aquamarine, by the way).

Thankfully, there is this wonderful website that tutors not-so-tech-savvy journalists and computer specialists alike about the basics of coding.

W3 Schools is this website that has changed the way I look at website developing and the coding that goes along with it.

Honestly, if you do one lesson every day you will be surprised at how much you can learn and at how fast you will be able to edit your own content on your blog.

Granted, you need to constantly practice these lessons to keep them fresh in your mind, but after a while, the basics become second nature. But, man is it great when you actually know what this means:

Thank you, W3 Schools for showing me the light when I was in the dark about coding. I am now a saved journalist in this digital age.

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