I am not a developer. I don’t know PHP, CSS, or any of those countless other scary three letter abbreviations. I’m just someone with a fascination with online journalism, finding new ways to tell stories online and who enjoys sharing them with a larger audience.

When I found out in the summer of 2008 that I would be switching positions to become the Web Editor of my college newspaper The Whit, I knew one thing was certain: a redesign had to take place. The Web site is antiqued and uninteresting.

I knew what other college newspapers were doing for their redesigns: they were following a young, ambitious college student from Temple University in Philadelphia named Sean Blanda. In early 2008, Blanda lead a charge in the college newspaper world. He blogged about how he was working to move his college newspaper, Temple News, to WordPress MU. He wasn’t the first to make this transformation but he was among the first to do it in such a public way. He blogged about the process on his Web site. Over the summer, I re-read some of his posts. He (someone who unarguably knows WordPress and developing Web sites) talked about the struggles he was having in moving his database over to the new server. I got scared.

“If he ran into problems in the midst of his transition, then how difficult will it be for me?” I wondered. [Read more...]