I finished my last freelance story for 2013, a NationalGeographic.com article about a dinosaur fossil with a fleshy comb like that of a rooster.

I also took a few lessons on CodeAcademy. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a quick primer on various programming languages, I find their lessons quite a bit of fun. I tried them sometime in early 2012, but the site didn’t have as many lessons then.

I finished their modules on HTML and CSS programming, nothing too involved, but quite useful. It was a lot of stuff I’d taught myself haphazardly by tinkering with my website, but it was nice to learn it in a systematic way.

Mostly it just helped me understand better how to play around with this website’s design, which I promptly did. Hopefully it’s a bit cleaner-looking now…

I plan to try the Javascript module at some point. It’s not that I will ever really need to do much HTML/CSS or Javascript programming, but it’s definitely nice to get a better idea of how it’s done, just in case I need to make any changes to the site.

And it’s just fun to learn new things 🙂

Also, apparently journalists should all learn programming, so I might as well do my bit…I dare say it can’t hurt for the future.

I’m off to India next week for Christmas and New Year, which should be fun, I haven’t been home for a few years so I’m really looking forward to it.

Just thought I should sign off for the year. It’s been a good one, and I’m looking forward to writing many more interesting stories next year!