As our older readers might have guessed, the Mustang Daily website has changed dramatically. It wasn’t as easy as plugging in a new theme and turning it on. The needs of the Mustang Daily were many, and it took a good month to find a theme and get everyone to agree on it. Then it was the matter of installing it without crashing the site or taking it down for more than half a minute, as well as tweaking the code to get everything just right.
But there is one problem.
I’m not a real code monkey.
Or at least, I’m not a trained code monkey. I am technically a professional code monkey, since I am getting paid to throw PHP and CSS code at the website until it works the way I want it to, but I haven’t pursued coding academically. All of my work was done by scouring support forums, screaming at Google, calling my graduated code monkey friends and praying that I didn’t make the site explode with my tiny tweaks.
Thankfully I’ve been building websites with HTML since I was in junior high, way back when Yahoo! Geocities was the coolest thing ever and it has helped a lot.
Honestly, I can attribute all my computer knowledge to just spending way too much time on it.
The a, e, s, t, n and o keys of my laptop (which is a PC, thank you very much Mac-infested journalism computer labs) have their letters smudged off from frequent use. My fingers have brilliant muscle memory when it comes to typing, to the point where I don’t need to look at the keyboard or even pay attention to the computer at all to type.
I’m a certified brony, I know who (or more appropriately what) Trollface is, and I do have a particular fondness for Pokémon, Jonathan Coulton and webcomics. If you haven’t noticed, I’m wearing a pink Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers shirt in my blog photo.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s a good thing. It means you have a life. I’m a disciple of internet culture, mostly because I spend a lot of time laughing at memes and not enough time out partying or getting my daily dose of exercise. All of my jobs involve computers and the majority of my hobbies involve computers.
I may not know the inner workings of them, but I have learned that almost any question I have, any problem I face, can be answered by a search engine, a smidgen of research skills and just plain stubbornness. It’s a lesson every student should learn. When people ask me how I did something code-wise on the website, I say “Long story short, I’m magic.” Honestly? I just googled it.
The site still has a ways to go, but thankfully all you lovely readers only can see the pretty façade of the website’s new home.
Meanwhile, I’m inside the place — replacing the outdated wiring, yanking out the shag carpeting, tiling the bathrooms, knocking out walls and putting fresh coats of paint everywhere. Thankfully none of you will actually be going inside, only the news staff will ever see it. But once I have this site up to code, freshly painted and carpeted, I’ll work on the curb appeal: landscaping and maybe even repaint the porch. This metaphor is getting lengthy so let me just sum it up.
The reader’s experience with mustangdaily.net will grow and change as I fix things up. Regardless, we at the Mustang Daily will still be delivering quality content regardless of the medium — print or online — and I will personally try and make this website at least 20 percent cooler.