This week, I struggled with PHP. I think it was more of a conceptual struggle. I didn’t know what to add to my homepage with PHP. I thought of it as a background language. I don’t know how to differentiate between languages that have functions that just spit out an answer, and languages that have clear functionality. I don’t understand the functionality of PHP. On web searches, I discovered how to make it spit out a date, and I saw that people used it to create forms but not how they implemented it into a page to do something.
Anyhoo, I added some PHP functions that I saw on the Internet and felt could be useful but didn’t see how they’d incorporate. However, on another web search I found resources like this one that showed me a couple different uses.
Something that stood out to me in the readings today was the design thinking piece. I thought it was especially interesting because at ONA, one of the workshops we participated in was focused on design thinking. We were brainstorming different disciplines within journalism. We wrote each discipline on a sticky note, and then categorized them. Later, we tried formulating a new way to tell a story incorporating four stories from different categories. That workshop was helpful for me because having the problem and the solutions set out in front of me made them so much easier to conceptualize.
I thought it was interesting that designers have been harboring their way of thinking and the rest of us are just now catching on because some of it gave a new name. The piece and my experiences at ONA both made me want to delve deeper and find more creative ways to tell stories as a journalist.