OKSPJ.com has two stories behind it - the one for me and the one for the site itself.
Since I'm the one writing this, let's start with my story first, which leads into story No. 2.
It was early 2001. I had just been accepted into the University of Oklahoma - Norman and I was finishing my last semester of high school in Caroline, Wisc. My older brother, who is already a student at OU in meteorology informs me that all students have the ability to create their own student Web sites off of the student server, students.ou.edu.
In fact, he had already created one (although he has not been a student there for many years, nor have I, both of our pages are still up). I used his Web page's source code (you go to view under your File - Edit - View listings on the top of the screen, then go down to "Source") to create my own. My favorite part of this new site was a little GIF icon that continuously drank a foaming glass of Diet Coke.
Thus, I was introduced into the World Wide Web... which I don't think anyone really calls it anymore. I continued to update the site periodically throughout my college career as I saw fit. Terms like "IMG SRC" and "A HREF" became a second language to me, because I never really comprehended Spanish, despite four years of it in both high school and college... but I'm still trying.
My "second language" soon became known to my sorority, as I was elected secretary, overseeing the Web site for them. However, my shining professional moment of triumph came in my last semester in college, when I oversaw the OU Student Media's "online initiative" to overhaul Web operations. The first day this new site, "oudaily.com" came online, everything went wrong... or at least it should have. The company we went through to have our media site had somehow made it that it would only recognize HTML code, and not simple spaces (
br) or images (img src). I had to once again rely on my second language to keep our site launch from crashing down.
And now, is where story No. 1 leads to story No. 2, the creation of OKSPJ.com. I had met two professional colleagues through both my work in Norman, Carol Cole-Frowe and from my sorority and OU, Joy Jenkins. Carol expressed the need for SPJ to have an updated site to post info. Joy said they did not know how to access the current site. Despite the fact that I was not a member of SPJ, they asked for my assistance, knowing my past work with oudaily.com and normantranscript.com.
Not knowing where to start with previous sites (I found at least two old sites and another that couldn't be accessed any longer online), I just started a new one, with newly registered domain name off GoDaddy.com. Like I had once done with my brother's sites, I used old site source codes to move old sites onto a new location. Then, once the information was up and running, I created a new template to view this information.
Thus, OKSPJ.com became a reality. It has everything that the old site has, but more importantly, it will begin to have new content to reflect the new media atmosphere we journalists have grown into recently, like this blog here.
I look forward to the feedback for your new site. Just remember, there was a Diet Coke drinking GIF icon involved, but absolutely no Spanish fluency at all.
~AP
PS: Until I can get the formatting of this page sorted out, please scroll to the bottom to see the links that will lead you back to the main page. This is an outside sourced blog, so when you combine two competing pages together, things can sometimes turn ugly.