My career as a copy editor has been a lot more than just dealing with words. From the start in 1982, I did newspaper page design, and when the internet came along, I added web duties almost right away.

That’s why I have a workable knowledge of html — in the early days, when I was at The Herald-Whig, the website was hard coded.

I’ve worked on timelines with various software, done maps and graphics, etc., as part of my job.

When I was at the University of Missouri teaching interactive editing, I ended up learning how to use the Timeline JS open source timeline tool from the Knight Lab. I didn’t work in graphics, but my student and I edited graphics for the Columbia Missourian and, in the course of having to correct graphics, I had to learn how to use it.

I’m at the University Daily Kansan at the University of Kansas now and I’ve been talking to the staff about doing more interactive features (from Snapchat —  follow them, their doing good work — to timelines). So in working with one of the students, showing her Timeline JS, I did a quick timeline of my journalism/copy editing career.

Then I wrote this blog so I’d have a place to put it as a demo. And then I found out WordPress.com sites won’t support iframes. Rats. But if you click on this screemshot of it, it should take you to the timeline. (Which defeats the purpose of having a timeline here, but I can hope for system improvement. Meanwhile, you can get an idea of what it looks like.)

So I’m not sure there’s much to learn here, other than my birth date. But if you stumble on this it should get you thinking about editing being a lot more than words, especially web editing in the field of journalism. This timeline took me about 15 minutes to do, and that included tracking down the photos. (Of course, I did not have to do research, and — horrors — no one edited this for me.)