Getting to know the 'black screen'
Thus far, we’ve gotten good at our core skills – sort, filter, merge and aggregate. But communicating that information on the internet is just as important. We’ll finish up last week’s data cleaning exercise, then get into some coding.
Housekeeping
- About that wiki page. Should we do it together?
- We’ll get pitches back to you Sunday night.
- Critique time
From last week: finishing up your data join exercise.
We’ll finish our exercise from last time, which was supposed to be about learning that data isn’t perfect. (Instead, it devolved into a pivot table exercise, which is also just fine.)
No need to start from scratch; this excel file should get you on your way.
Goal: get a county fips code for at least 95% of all guns and counties. Making a pivot table if no_match
and `guns' could help. Or just filter.
Basic HTML and CSS
You don’t necessarily need to know html and CSS to be successful journalist in 2014, but having a good understanding of how it works – and especially how to make or edit small things – will still be useful. Also, considering many of the people hiring you don’t know the difference between basic internet competency and a computer science degree, help keep them fooled as long as possible. (Part of this exercise is stolen/adapted from Code With Me, which has great lessons.)
Make a folder for today’s class on your computer. Inside it, make a file called
index.html
. Open the file, write your name on it, and save it. Then open it in a web browser, and blamo!How might formatting help us here?
Insert
<html>
,<head>
,<title>
and<body>
tags to make your page valid. Tabs matter!Check out some sample content we may have written as a class based on our excel exercises. Paste it into the
body
of your HTML page, and let’s mark it up. You might want to use these docs as a reference.Style the content to look as much like NYT content as possible. Use the inspector!