What she said: Learn scripting!

Sometimes, perhaps too often, I feel like a parrot channeling Mindy McAdams ... but again, she hits one out of the park with her latest post, Why you should suck it up and learn to script.

I know as printies, the prospect of learning something as simple as HTML might seem daunting ... because, hey, I once was one of you. When I interviewed for my first Web job, they wrapped things up by asking me to code up a Web page using nothing but a text editor, a raw photo and print from an AP article.

I corrected the article for AP style, turned it in, and meekly left ... convinced I didn't get the job.

Remarkably, they hired me, and within a couple weeks I had picked up more than enough HTML to do the job ... and since I've been able to build on that knowledge base.

In sum, this ain't rocket science. If you can thrive in as competitive and difficult business as journalism, you can learn to code.

Benefits include the satisfaction of being able to do something yourself, as well as a certain insight into the mindset necessary for programming. Once you start learning, you'll see evidence of that mindset in other things, too. It's difficult to explain.

But not hard to learn.

Read Mindy, and then follow her instructions. (Or ask me, I have some ideas.)

• Why you should suck it up and learn to script