Tag Archives: html

  

W3rules – a modern HTML and CSS reference

I’m a passable web developer, but one who still needs to constantly Google things like “css box shadow” because I don’t do enough front end design to justify memorizing all of the syntax. Problem is, doing a websearch for HTML/CSS terms returns entire pages of not-quite-up-to-par links to W3schools, a site that has dominated web dev references in search engine results since I first started coding.

Lots of failed attempts have been made to displace w3schools. So I won’t aspire to that. I just want a site, even if I’m the only user, where I can refresh my aging mind on the vagaries of CSS syntax.

I call it: W3Rules. Here’s a sample page for font-family. This will be a good chance to get more familiar with Middleman, which looks very fun to use.

  

Coding for Journalists 101: Go from knowing nothing to scraping Web pages. In an hour. Hopefully.

UPDATE (12/1/2011): Ever since writing this guide, I’ve wanted to put together a site that is focused both on teaching the basics of programming and showing examples of practical code. I finally got around to making it: The Bastards Book of Ruby.

I’ve since learned that trying to teach the fundamentals of programming in one blog post is completely dumb. Also, I hope I’m a better coder now than I was a year and a half ago when I first wrote this guide. Check it out and let me know what you think:

http://ruby.bastardsbook.com

Someone asked in this online chat for journalists: I want to program/code, but where does a non-programmer journalist begin?

My colleague Jeff Larson gave what I believe is the most practical and professionally-useful answer: web-scraping (jump to my summary of web-scraping here, or read this more authorative source).

This is my attempt to walk someone through the most basic computer science theory so that he/she can begin collecting data in an automated way off of web pages, which I think is one of the most useful (and time-saving) tools available to today’s journalist. And thanks to the countless hours of work by generous coders, the tools are already there to make this within the grasp of a beginning programmer.

You just have to know where the tools are and how to pick them up.

Click here for this page’s table of contents. Or jump to the the theory lesson. Or to the programming exercise. Or, if you already know what a function and variable is, and have Ruby installed, go straight to two of my walkthroughs of building a real-world journalistic-minded web scraper: Scraping a jail site, and scraping Pfizer’s doctor payment list.

Or, read on for some more exposition:

Continue reading →