Journalism, a challenge!

When I was browsing other classmates’ blogs, I saw a comment Mindy made on Laura’s blog. Mindy recommended one of her favourite Journalism blogs, so I clicked into that one and found many great things. The blog was called Maranda Writes, written by a new graduated journalist. She shares her experiences as a new journalist in her job and what she learned in journalism school. All her experiences, struggling and thoughts remind me of my last year experience as a journalist in China. Though we are in different countries which enjoy really different media systems and regulations, the feelings as new journalists are kinda of similar. She said that challenge is the core of journalism and liking challenge is the essential quality of being a journalist. I have been asking myself the same question “what’s my advantage of being a journalist” since I stepped into journalism school five years ago. I don’t know any field very well and I cannot write very well, I am always in a situation of question my capabilities. However, I know at least I have some merits that I like communicating with others, I like going out to find something I don’t know and I like challenging the world and myself. Knowing nothing is not the worst, but don’t realize that you know nothing is the worst. Challenge the knowledge you have may be the key of being a successful journalist.

Also I like all the quotes on her blog. These are the quotes I really like:

• “I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.”
  — Henry Luce
• “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
  — Aldous Huxley
• “It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop.”
  — Confucius

HTML and web design

Before my toolkit class talking about HTML, I only used HTML to add some images to my BBS posts in order to make them more interesting. But every-time, I made mistakes when I tried to write the image HTML, as I didn’t know how HTML works and the basic rules of written HTML. For many times, I just forgot to put “/” or other signs, which messed up the whole process. It is so complicated for me to understand how HTML is written to make a website work.

In fact, when I knew that I would learn HTML in my toolkit class, I was doubt why we should learn it when there are so many different ways of designing a web which are much easier if compared with HTML. Using HTML seems a little bit out of date. After the toolkit class, though I know I still cannot write HTML to design a whole web page, at least, I have some clear idea about HTML and at least I can understand HTML page. I can figure out where is the title, headline, image, paragraph, etc. Thanks to that wonderful HTML tutorial page HTML Dog, which makes the way of understanding and writing HTML much clearer.

However, I am still kind of doubting how far HTML can work to design a web. I have no idea about the new technologies in web design field. But when I told my friends that I was learning HTML, they reacted with a “surprising” face, asking why I was learning this “out-of-date”web design method. In class, we were talking about the basic functions about HTML. But the sample web page we made looks a little bit simple, which made me question how far HTML can do in designing a web. Can we create any kind of web page as complicated as we want by HTML?