Comments on: Web editing: Literacy skills for 2007

By: Intro to CMS - WordPress.com « ASIS&T Student Chapter

Intro to CMS - WordPress.com « ASIS&T Student Chapter — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:15:35 +0000

[...] Web editing: Literacy skills for 2007 [...]

By: Patrick Thornton

Patrick Thornton — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:53:59 +0000

I’d still recommend Word Press because of its power. There are so many plugins and themes for people to play around with, and it has a vibrant open-source community around it.

I recommend that people get cheap hosting to run a Word Press blog. I use A Small Orange, and you can get a plan for $5 a month that will let you run a bunch of domains, databases and have unlimited e-mail. Plus, you can install a blog in minutes (it also does Drupal and others like it).

I realize it isn’t free, but it’s a great solution for people who are serious about learning. And $5 a month is hardly a lot of money for learning.

By: The Journalism Iconoclast

The Journalism Iconoclast — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:38:22 +0000

[...] what exactly do they need to know? Mindy McAdams has an excellent blog post about the skills that journalism students should [...]

By: Mindy

Mindy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:33:22 +0000

That’s an excellent point. If you use a WordPress.com (hosted) blog, you cannot change the CSS and HTML. At Blogger, you can change everything in the CSS and HTML.

If you install WordPress on your own site, you can change and control even more than Blogger allows. But you would need to have your own host.

By: sanam

sanam — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:25:06 +0000

Well, I totally agree that learning how to work with a CMS and learning a little bit of html and CSS would be enough for journalists. The rest would be the job of the web developers. So, I think blogging would be a good and easy way for journalists to learn these things.

On the side note, I recommend Blogger instead of Word Press for learning “a little bit.” As much as I love Word Press and have recently moved all my blogs to it, I think Blogger gives more opportunity to learn html and CSS, since Word Press does not allow editing either of them (if you are hosted on wordpress.com). Using wordpress.com just helps you get to know how a CMS works. I learned just a little bit of html and CSS through adding links to my blog on blogspot.com, changing the font, direction, colors, background, etc, when I had no idea how these things worked.

By: Mindy

Mindy — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:35:57 +0000

Yes, I agree that one learns quite a bit of PHP as soon as one starts trying to adjust how the blog appears. It’s a nice way to learn, in my opinion! Very practical.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:38:02 +0000

I’ve learned quite a bit from changing a CMS’s themes or bending the php to do what I want it to.

I like to learn a bit of everything — you never know when a bit of knowledge may come in handy.

For the busy reporter, I would like to see him/her familiar with a basic WordPress-style CMS/blogging platform. What html/css/php that means is up to his or her ambitions.

For Web producers/programmers, it’s a no-brainer: learn everything you can or your position demands.

By: Meg

Meg — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:47:04 +0000

I’ve been very happy with WordPress so far. (I’ve been using it since May.)

I learned HTML back in 1997 and had a site that I updated for a few years using HTML, then a mix of HTML and CSS. I’m in the process of bringing it back into the picture, but this time I’m seriously considering using WordPress. Why reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

I made another, company web site without a CMS, but the pages are fairly static.