A favicon on your blog or website is essential to creating brand identity. Favicons are small icons (usually 16×16 pixels) that appear next to your blog title in the browser tab. They help readers identify your blog and are super easy to add. Learn how to add a custom favicon to your blog in less than a minute!
Adding a Custom Favicon
This tutorial will walk you through how to add a favicon in both WordPress and Blogger. We’ve created a few basic ones you can use as you try out this tutorial. Click the button below to get the whole pack:
In WordPress
This guide should work with all WordPress themes and is easy to follow!
Check your dashboard
All you need to do is visit your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to the Appearance tab on the left. From the drop-down menu, pick the customize button to access favicon settings.
Update your site identity
In the new window, pick the Site Identity tab, and in the Site Icon section, upload your favicon by clicking the ‘Select Site Icon’ button.
Remember to save all changes by clicking the blue Publish button in the top right corner.
In Blogger
In your dashboard, go to the Settings tab on the left. Then find the Favicon button in the Basic section on the right.
On the new page, click ‘Choose File’ and search your computer for the favicon file you wish to upload. Then click ‘Save’ to save your changes.
View your blog, and you’ll see your new favicon!
If you’d like a custom favicon designed that coordinates perfectly with your blog design, visit our blog accessories shop and purchase the “favicon” option, and a designer will be in touch to get that custom designed and added to your blog for you.
Machine learning touches so many aspects of our everyday lives, from the way our TikTok For You pages are curated to Amazon Alexa’s ability to recognize the sound of our voices. But, as ubiquitous as the technology is, there are still some misconceptions about the machine learning field.
You might have wondered: How can a machine have thoughts? Can AI robots become sentient? And is machine learning going to replace our jobs? Ahead, Nitya Mandyam, Senior Curriculum Developer at Codecademy, shares the truth about some of the most common myths and misconceptions people have about machine learning and artificial intelligence (because, yes, those are different things).
We hope that demystifying the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence empowers you to learn some of the skills that go into the technologies. Considering a career in machine learning? Whether you want to become a Machine Learning/AI Engineer or a Data Scientist, we have lots of resources that will help you develop the skills you need to break into this exciting industry. Be sure to explore our whole catalog of machine learning courses to see what’s possible.
The misconception: All machine learning is artificial intelligence.
While you might see the term “AI” slapped on anything that involves machines automating tasks, there’s a difference between AI and machine learning. The simplest way to think about it is that machine learning is a subset of AI, Nitya explains.
The same way that robotics replicates human motor skills, “AI concerns itself with the broader task of replicating human cognitive intelligence,” Nitya says. Machine learning, on the other hand, uses algorithms to make decisions based on patterns found in data.
Distinguishing between AI and machine learning is more than just a nomenclature issue: “To ask the question, What does it mean for a machine to think?, is to ask the question, What does it mean for humans to think?” Nitya says. If you want to dive deeper into the various ways machine learning is impacting the world, check out our course Learn the Basics of Machine Learning.
The misconception: Machine learning will take away all our jobs.
People have been fearful that robots and machines will replace the human workforce since the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays, you hear a similar refrain about AI and machine learning. (Even tech bigwigs like Elon Musk have declared that AI will eventually make jobs “pointless.”)
One pressing concern to consider when talking about the job market in machine learning is the “ghost work” that goes unseen. Within AI systems, there are certain tasks that are not cheaper or more efficient to automate using machines, Nitya explains.
For example, there are people who are hired to do crucial — but non-technical — tasks, like flagging content or labeling data, so that machines can “learn.” This is a phenomenon that anthropologist Mary L. Gray dubbed, “ghost work,” which is essentially the idea that there’s a hidden labor force in tech performing the task of a machine. These jobs typically pay very little and do not provide benefits, creating a problematic wealth disparity within the tech industry.
The misconception: You need a PhD to get hired as a Machine Learning Engineer.
A Machine Learning Engineer is responsible for building the systems that computers use to learn and make predictions on their own. You do not need an advanced degree or years of academic research under your belt to get hired as a Machine Learning Engineer, but you do need to know how to code.
According to Nitya, working in machine learning requires familiarity with math and statistics. “Stats is at the heart of knowing whether or not you know a prediction is right or wrong and doing that type of analysis,” she says. (Need a refresher on statistics? Check out our path Master Statistics with Python or our beginner-friendly course Learn Statistics with Python.)
Beyond those technical skills, machine learning is very well-suited for people who “have the curiosity and inquisitiveness of a scientist, and the willingness to go down a rabbit hole,” Nitya says. People who like building things also thrive in the field, she adds.
The misconception: Machine learning can be used to predict the future and solve any problem.
Machine learning is more like a reproduction of the past than a crystal ball that predicts the future, Nitya says. Machine learning technology enables us to pick up on patterns that we would miss on our own, and then use that information to inform future decisions.
People often assume that machine learning is a magical panacea that can solve any problem, which speaks to the excitement around the technology. “When a technology shows promise, you have this knock-on effect where everybody wants to use that technology,” Nitya says. But machine learning is not always the right fit. For example, machines aren’t more objective than humans, and relying on them for everything can have negative consequences.
To use an analogy, different DIY projects require different types of tools. “Sometimes you need a pen knife, and sometimes a power tool — it all depends on the problem you’re trying to solve,” Nitya says. In this case, machine learning would be considered a power tool. “Sometimes you don’t need knives at all,” she adds.
Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers play a crucial role at tech companies. After all, they work to make sure that an end-product actually does what clients want it to do. They also check that the software involved follows the established procedures. In short, as the job title suggests, they ensure that the product meets quality standards and requirements.
Tech companies need QA Engineers, namely Software QA Engineers, to maintain a program’s quality. It’s no wonder, then, that QA Engineers have relatively high salaries. According to Glassdoor, the average annual salary for a QA Engineer in the U.S. is $104,148.
Of course, an individual’s salary will vary, based on factors like location and experience.
Factors for determining QA Engineer salary
A lot goes into determining what you’ll make as a QA Engineer. Let’s take a look at the most important factors.
Education
As is the case for many other professions, education plays a big role in dictating your salary as a QA Engineer. Employers like to see that you have a degree, certificate, or that you’ve taken some relevant courses — whether it be from a university, boot camp, or online. Why? Well, education shows your employer that you’ve put in the time and effort to learn skills important to the job.
When it comes to college degrees, QA Engineers tend to get an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in computer science. However, having a degree is definitely not a requirement to get hired as a QA Engineer at all companies. There are plenty of online certifications you can complete to get the background you need. For example, we offer courses like Learn Testing for Web Development and Learn JavaScript Unit Testing, both of which give you important skills for QA work.
Experience
Having experience with software is one of the most important aspects of this position’s salary prospects. Experience can include using dedicated software testing (automation testing) and having the programming skills to test software on your own (manual testing).
QA professionals in the tech industry should understand programming languages, operating systems, and computer hardware and software. The programming languages QA Engineers use the most are Java, C, C++, Python, and SQL.
QA Engineers are often on software development teams. Their role in the development process is to stress-test products (i.e., testing how an app performs when put under conditions beyond the expected limits of operation). In addition, they provide advice on how to make products better, so knowledge of information technology is beneficial for any QA Engineer to have.
If you have quality assurance experience outside of the tech industry, that can also help in your job search — but technical skills are still a must.
Location
Your salary will also vary according to where you live. According to Ziprecruiter, the average highest annual salary per location in the United States for a QA Engineer is in San Mateo ($108,978). Here’s the breakdown of the cities with the highest annual salary averages for this role.
San Mateo, CA: $108,978
Green River, WY: $102, 672
Richmond, CA: $101,498
Stamford, CT: $100,263
Bellevue, WA: $99,810
Brooklyn, NY: $99,421
Belgrade, MT: $99,195
Santa Clara, CA: $98,249
New Haven, CT: $97,249
Brockton, MA: $96,815
QA Engineer salary by experience level
Job titles generally remain the same throughout the career path for a QA Engineer. However, sometimes you will see variations on the title, like Software Tester, IT QA, and so on. These roles are more or less the same.
Leveling up as a QA Engineer comes down to seniority. After gaining more experience, someone hired as an entry-level QA could progress to associate, senior, or lead QA Engineering levels.
It is important to remember that experience level depends on time, as in your time spent learning about QA (i.e. education) or the amount of time spent in a position related to product QA. Therefore, the more experience you have in applicable areas of QA, the more you can showcase your skills to potential employers, and the more likely it is that your pay will increase.
Entry-level salaries
Glassdoor reports an entry-level QA engineer’s average salary at $97,782 USD per year. Starting at entry-level means making less than what mid-level and late-career QA Engineers are earning, but getting hired into the industry early on your career has its benefits.
QA Engineering is a great career path, because you will work in a field where you can learn more about overall software development, which offers many long-term professional paths forward. Eventually, if you are inclined to do so (and have acquired enough experience), you could make the jump to a position like Software Developer or Software Engineer. For example, in our forums, Pablo (@peachesmotorsports) described his path transitioning from QA Engineer to Software Engineer Manager, and gave advice for others looking to do the same.
Mid-level salaries
The average yearly pay of mid-level QA Engineers is around $107,360 (per Glassdoor).
A mid-level QA engineer’s responsibilities will require more manual testing capabilities than an entry-level role, meaning you’ll have to know the nitty-gritty of manually testing software for defects. To do so, you’ll need to have knowledge of SQL and defect tracking tools, experience working in Agile environments, and knowledge of automation frameworks. The better your toolkit is for different types of software-testing (and overall product quality assurance), the better you can leverage your salary.
Senior-level salaries
Late-career to experienced QA Engineers are paid around $127,611 per year (Glassdoor). Once you land a position in the entry level of the field, it can take 10-20 years to get to the senior or late-career level, but it can pay off.
Your QA Engineer career path
Overall, QA professionals tend to have relatively high salaries. If you’re looking for a job where you’d be an essential part of the tech industry and be able to grow your career throughout the years, you might be interested in quality assurance. Here are some courses you can take to get started:
Once you are in a QA role, you are in a great position to learn more about software engineering. From there, you have the flexibility to either expand your career path in QA or explore other avenues in tech.
If you’re interested in becoming a QA Engineer, take a look at the above courses, as well as other programming languages in our course catalog.
An impressive hole suddenly appeared in Chile, specifically in Tierra Amarilla, in the northern region of Atacama, without initially having any apparent explanation.
Chilean authorities are investigating the reason for this hole, which is at least 25 meters wide and 200 meters deep. The hole appeared for the first time last Saturday, July 30.
The Mayor of the area, Cristóbal Zúñiga, told the media about his perception of the events: “We believe that what happened is due to the fact that the mine intervened in the riverbed, drying up groundwater [water tables] and working inside them until the ground collapsed due to the telluric movements that are made to exploit the mine and the vacuum that is generated under the ground. The hole that you see is smaller than what is at the bottom. It will continue to grow until it generates perhaps an inverted cone,” said the mayor.
Shockingly, the sinkhole is still growing which has left the community greatly concerned. “It is still active, it is still growing, and it is something that has not previously been seen in our community.”
Fortunately, no one was injured by the sinkhole, said the mining company Lundin Mining Corporation, which suspended all mining work in the area immediately after detection. “There has been no impact on personnel, equipment, or infrastructure.”
The huge sinkhole is wide enough to swallow the White House, the country’s National Geological and Mining Survey said.
But what could be the possible causes of this phenomenon?
According to National Geographic: “Sinkholes are cavities in the ground that form when water erodes an underlying rock layer.
Two types of sinkholes exist. One forms when the roof of a cave collapses and exposes the underground cavern. The second type forms when water dissolves the rock underneath the soil and creates an underground chasm. Without rock to support it, the soil layer collapses and creates a hole on the surface.
Sinkholes have both natural and human causes. Land made of a soft underground rock layer, such as rock salt around the Dead Sea or limestone in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is often riddled with sinkholes since the rock layer is easily dissolved.
Manmade sinkholes are created when city development compromises the structural integrity of underlying rock. Roads, buildings, and other types of construction may cause water to collect in certain areas and wash away the supporting rock layer (especially at low sea levels and after heavy rainfall)”.
Nature, its mysteries, and how men with our activity can affect it is a current topic. If you are interested in going deeper, you cannot miss the following information that will give you a clearer view of this phenomenon.
With more world-class content launching every week, there are always new topics to explore, new skills to learn, and new ways to achieve your goals. These latest courses, Specializations, and Professional Certificate programs cover everything from developing your own paid advertising campaign and building a high-performing team to creating machine learning-powered projects to add to your portfolio. What will you learn next?
Gain in-demand skills and prepare for an entry-level job in marketing or e-commerce. You’ll learn how to use industry-standard tools and platforms like Canva, Constant Contact, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Shopify, and Twitter from subject-matter experts at Google. Build your own portfolio with projects to show to potential employers.
Master business essentials across strategy, marketing, and finance, and prepare for career success in managerial roles from one of the world’s top business schools. You’ll cover fundamental concepts such as the basics of accounting for assets and liabilities and learn how to use a statement of cash flows to evaluate a company.
Develop a personal toolbox and leadership framework to foster creativity in your organization and build the workplace skills necessary to manage teams, projects, and organizations more effectively. Incorporate design thinking and creativity into your everyday business practices and learn how to drive innovation at any stage of business growth.
Executive MBA from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Develop an insight into key managerial processes and gain analytical expertise with a technology-centric viewpoint. This highly customizable degree allows you to follow your interests and choose your area of specialization after covering the fundamentals of business and technology.
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Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course, one of the first and most popular in our ten-year history, is now a three-course Specialization featuring new and updated content! In this beginner-level program you will learn the most important machine learning concepts and tools.
Get started in the world of coding and learn to build beautiful websites as a career. This nine-course program, designed by the software engineering experts at Meta, will prepare you for a career as a front-end developer.
Build the skills to launch and advance a successful career as an iOS or Android developer.Learn in-demand skills for developing reliable, scalable and user-friendly mobile apps for multiple operating systems, such as iOS and Android. This program is taught by industry-recognized experts at Meta.
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Whether you are just starting your career or changing jobs, this program is an ideal way for you to develop a strong foundation in IT fundamentals, networking, cybersecurity and cloud computing, which are also required skills for many other technology jobs including Software Engineer, Data Analyst and Data Scientist.
Master high-impact workplace and leadership skills for achieving professional success. This Specialization can be taken by anyone no matter your age or work experience, but is especially ideal for those entering the workforce or in the early stages of their careers.
In this course, you will gain hands-on experience on building, training, and deploying scalable machine learning models with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon EC2 instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs. This course is designed for ML practitioners, including data scientists and developers, who have a working knowledge of machine learning workflows.
In this Specialization, you’ll develop the foundational knowledge required to work with Juniper Contrail. You’ll learn about cloud concepts, virtual networks, and cloud management. Upon completing this Specialization, you will understand virtual networks and how to configure them using Juniper’s cloud-native Contrail Networking solution.
Learn about the different types of computer vision use cases and explore different machine learning strategies for solving these use cases. This course is part of the Advanced Machine Learning on Google Cloud Specialization.
In this Professional Certificate program, you will learn how to integrate, transform, and consolidate data from various structured and unstructured data systems into structures that are suitable for building analytics solutions that use Microsoft Azure data services. It is an ideal learning opportunity if you are a data engineer or developer who wants to demonstrate your expertise in designing and implementing data solutions.
In this Professional Certificate program, you’ll learn how to create end-to-end solutions in Microsoft Azure. You will learn how to implement Azure compute solutions, create Azure Functions, implement and manage web apps, develop solutions utilizing Azure storage, implement authentication and authorization, and secure their solutions by using KeyVault and Managed Identities.
If you’re a data scientist with existing knowledge of Python and machine learning frameworks like Scikit-Learn, PyTorch, and Tensorflow, who want to build and operate machine learning solutions in the cloud, this is an ideal Professional Certificate program for you to learn how to create end-to-end solutions in Microsoft Azure.
Develop interdisciplinary skills in data science and gain knowledge of statistical analysis, data mining, and machine learning from one of the nation’s top-ranked Tier 1 research institutions. You’ll gain new data skills, build a portfolio through hands-on projects, and earn an industry-recognized credential to help you stand out to recruiters and hiring managers.
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When you’re thinking about roles on engineering teams, it’s easy to focus on the ones that involve daily coding. But actually, being on an engineering team can involve a range of responsibilities. One important role is that of the Scrum Master.
In a nutshell, the Scrum Master leads the engineering team on projects and makes sure that each individual member of the team achieves success. However, because Scrum Masters (as the name implies) work with a specific development framework called Scrum, there’s a little more nuance to it.
Read on to learn what a Scrum Master is, what exactly they do, the skills they need, and how you can get started taking on this role within your team.
What is scrum?
To understand what a Scrum Master is, you have first to have a basic grasp of Scrum. Scrum is a development framework that focuses on teamwork, collaboration, accountability, and an iterative work process in order to update and improve on software. It’s closely related to Agile software development, which is an approach to completing projects that’s also used fairly often in the tech world.
The premise that drives the Scrum framework is simple and sequential: First, begin with the things you can see or what you know, then keep track of your progress, making tweaks as you need to. Of course, there’s more to it, but this is the core of the Scrum process.
Within the Scrum framework, teams develop small pieces of applications in development sessions called sprints. Dividing the project up in this way enables the team to catch mistakes faster and fix them quickly. As a result, there’s much less overall risk of app failure or security issues, as well as a lower development cost.
Crucially, when a team uses the scrum framework, there’s a designated Scrum Master who’s in charge of the process.
What a Scrum Master does
A Scrum Master is charged with ensuring everyone on the team stays focused, on task, and continues to work well with each other during and between development sprints. A scrum master is a lot like the conductor of an orchestra, but one that works with all the players, individually and as a group, to help them perform their best.
This person is a combination of a coach, technical expert, and manager that makes sure a team of developers and programmers is organized and effectively communicating with each other. Scrum Masters also contribute to tech development as needed, and are responsible for delivering the team’s work upon deadline. More than likely, this person’s job title won’t be Scrum Master; in fact, Scrum Masters are usually engineers who are playing this role on a particular project. (That said, there are certainly people who hold the job title of Scrum Master, particularly at very large companies.)
A Project Manager and a Scrum Master are two very different animals. In short, a Project Manager focuses on the product, while a Scrum Master’s focus is the process. Let’s break this down a little more.
A Project Manager takes ownership of the project at a high level and interfaces with executives, customers, and others to ensure the project maintains the proper focus. A Scrum Master maintains a singular focus on the team’s process to create the product. They may work with the Product Manager, but only to provide updates and solicit higher-level feedback.
The tasks of a Scrum Master
A Scrum Master’s daily work is guided by the needs of the team. It’s not uncommon for there to be last-minute changes as individuals or groups run into issues during a project. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what a Scrum Master does:
Meetings for sprint planning: In these meetings, the Scrum Master makes sure the team stays focused on their goals and doesn’t over-commit to objectives out of the original scope of the sprint.
Host standups: Scrum Masters host daily standup meetings designed as relatively brief status checks that give the team members a chance to ask for or offer help.
Administration of the scrum board: The scrum board consists of software that is used to keep track of the project’s progress in detail. The Scrum Master may have to check that everything is up-to-date and functioning in a way that supports the sprint or overall project at hand.
One-on-one meetings: Some Scrum Masters use one-on-one meetings to check in, coach, or get feedback from developers or other stakeholders.
Reporting progress and performance: The Scrum Master has to analyze how the elements of the product are being built, how the process is working, and how any scrum management tools are working.
Internal consultation: From time to time, team members may need some coaching on working with the rest of the team or within an Agile environment. The Scrum Master facilitates these meetings, ensuring everyone is working well with the process.
Workflow improvement: A Scrum Master has to keep an eye out for issues that could or have already begun to affect the project’s progress. They also think of ways to improve efficiency and make the lives of developers easier.
What skills do you need to be a Scrum Master?
Coding is an essential skill for Scrum Masters. While a Project Manager may be able to work with little to no knowledge of coding, a Scrum Master needs to understand the coding process intimately to do their job.
This doesn’t mean that they have to be an absolute whiz at every programming language a dev team uses to build apps, but they do need to understand at least some of the basics. Having a working knowledge of coding can help them better design systems that help developers get the job done.
To gain a basic understanding of how to code, you can check out our Code Foundations Skill Path. This will give you an overview of the programming tools involved in coding and how they’re used.
To be an effective Scrum Master, you also need to have soft skills, like:
Clear, effective communication
Organization
The ability to maintain a focus on high-level objectives
Planning and foresight of potential pitfalls
The ability to listen and empathize with the concerns of others
Run the scrum
In addition to our Code Foundations Skill Path, you can also dig into several more specific courses that will give you the background knowledge you need to be a Scrum Master. These include:
These courses give you an in-depth look into how each of the languages is used to create solutions, which will make it easier for you, as a Scrum Master, to support and guide your team. Check out more in our course catalog.
In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.
There are countless ways to look up facts on the internet practically instantaneously — whether it’s a song you heard in a coffee shop or a celebrity’s height. But when you want to take a deep dive into a topic, most people rely on one specific website: Wikipedia.
With Wikipedia’s indiscriminate library of content and oft-questioned accuracy, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia has a mixed reputation.
“I feel like Wikipedia is just a breath of fresh air,” says Annie Rauwerda, creator of the popular Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia, which features obscure and entertaining Wikipedia entries. “It’s not perfect, but the good thing is, if you see something on Wikipedia that you don’t like, you have just as strong a voice as anyone else in the world.”
Wikipedia’s participatory format was viewed as a radical concept when it launched in the early ‘00s. Back in the ’90s, the internet was largely feudal, with people setting up their own sites on AngelFire to post content or flocking to sites like theGlobe.com where they could personalize profiles. Google emerged in 1998 as a search engine that organized links and individual pages on the web. If you wanted to access a digital encyclopedia, you could buy Microsoft Encarta, which was a bunch of CD-ROMs that cost hundreds of dollars.
“There are two things that Wikipedia did that were kind of revolutionary: One was being able to set free the creation and consumption of knowledge, and the second thing was just the way that it’s made,” explains Olga Vasileva, Lead Product Manager for the Reading Web Team of the Wikimedia Foundation.
For all the talk about the “World Wide Web” as an unprecedented platform for sharing ideas and information, before Wikipedia, there was no large-scale archive where people could gather and publish content that was bundled together merely for the public good — without factoring in any personal agendas or individual self-expression.
So when the people building Wikipedia chose to do so using “wiki” software, they filled a gap in the nascent online world. Wiki software enabled collaboration and made publishing content on the internet more accessible than it had ever been before. For the developer community, it extended the ideals of open-source collaboration from the back-end to the end-user experience. For end users, the only motivation to contribute was, theoretically, the greater good. It was the altruistic dream of the internet community come to life.
Even today, Wikipedia embodies many of the principles of open-source software: Wikipedia is a decentralized platform that anyone is free to use and access, it’s constantly being modified and updated by volunteer editors, and it advocates for transparency and a “neutral point of view.”
“We’ve proved that we can have a decentralized system of volunteers that are working to put this project together at a quality that is incredibly high,” Olga says. “And I think, to this day, that’s what is keeping us alive.”
The “magic” of how Wikipedia was built
Though it’s easy to write off Wikipedia as an unreliable source or Frankenstein internet phenomenon, it remained a humble and mighty force on the internet because of how it was strategically built and designed.
“Very often people take Wikipedia for granted, not for any particular reason other than that it’s just always been there, to many people, particularly young people,” Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder said in a 2019 interview with Wikimedia. “It’s ubiquitous. It’s like a magic thing in our lives.”
Of course, it’s not “magic” — it’s the result of savvy developers, UX designers, and technologists who designed a platform that architected a new paradigm for how users interacted on the internet and fostered an ardent community of contributors. To better understand the lessons today’s tech world can learn from Wikipedia, let’s take a look back on the history of how — and why — Wikipedia was built the way it was, and the innovative features that give it staying power today.
The wiki-powered technology
Wikipedia was founded by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales in 2001, but it started as an offshoot of Nupedia, a for-profit online encyclopedia that only published thoroughly vetted articles written by experts. Nupedia wasn’t getting the traction that they expected, so they had to think of new ways to recruit contributors if they wanted the business to scale.
A funny piece of technology called a “wiki” would change everything. Programmer Ward Cunningham invented wiki in 1994, and it was basically a website with pages and links that could be easily edited via the web browser. (Ward named it “wiki” after the Hawaiian word for “quick,” a nod to how fast he built it.) Wiki was mostly popular among software developers and engineers, who used the tool to collaborate on software with one another.
The new wiki-supported online encyclopedia allowed anyone to publish content on the site — no coding experience required. “You not only didn’t have to learn how to build your own page in HTML, you could do this and you could do it with other people dynamically,” Katherine Maher, former CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told Medium’s OneZero in 2021. “It took control over the web and put it into the keyboards of people.”
Combining the power of wiki technology with the collective knowledge of the users established the Wikipedia we know and use today. “People discovered that they can create something with other people that they don’t even know, but they come to trust, and make something that surprises them,” Ward said in a 2014 interview with Wikimedia.
The passionate users
All of the content on Wikipedia — more than 45 million articles in nearly 300 languages — is maintained and edited by more than 200,000 volunteer editors who contribute to Wikipedia every month for no pay. Wikipedians, as they’re called, use Wikipedia’s special markup language called MediaWiki to make changes to pages on the fly.
It takes a very persistent, determined person to acquire a working knowledge of all of Wikipedia’s guidelines and become a contributor — and they tend to take their roles very seriously. For example, some Wikipedia editors will “adopt a typo,” which means they make it their mission to search a specific typo and edit any instances. The community of Wikipedia contributors is close-knit, and people often team up and work on topics together through WikiProjects.
“Once they’re in, people get hooked,” Annie of @depthsofwikipedia says. “Even the most dedicated Wikipedia editors don’t know why they do it.” One reason? The sense that, “Well, someone has to do it.”
it’s tacky to admit it but I absolutely love being a total cop on Wikipedia sometimes.
oh, your PR firm is pissed this article details a well-covered scandal? no, you can’t remove it. who am I? I am a 20something with wifi, and as far as you’re concerned, the god of this article
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales got the inspiration to use a Creative Commons license from Richard Stallman, the creator of the General Public License open-source licensing and an early advocate for free software.
This collaborative approach doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is the “Wild, Wild West” when it comes to what actually gets published. Many Wikipedia editors feel passionate about upholding the site’s authority and neutral point of view. Though anyone can become an editor, you can’t just post anything you want on Wikipedia: Articles have to be based on “reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy,” according to Wikipedia’s sourcing guidelines.
Getting props from tech giants has also helped Wikipedia legitimize: Google recently bought Wikimedia’s enterprise API product, so the search engine can comb and reuse Wikipedia content more efficiently. YouTube annotates videos with Wikipedia pages to provide “authoritative” context and prevent spreading misinformation.
The spartan and ad-free design
At first glance, Wikipedia’s design might seem less splashy compared to other websites that are popular on the internet. But its bare bones design and muted color palette are intentionally boring.
Wikipedia’s design philosophy: Content comes first.
One of the most noticeable differences is that there are no ads on Wikipedia. Wikipedia famously doesn’t carry advertisements, and instead the site is funded by donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. As an encyclopedia, the organization takes a strong stance against running ads that could distract from the content on the page.
Wikipedia’s design has barely changed over its more than 20 years of existence. “We very much follow the philosophy that form follows function,” Olga says. “The content is really our treasure: It is what our communities are all about, and it’s why they exist. So the main thing in any design for Wikipedia is that the content needs to come first.”
Here’s a peek at the Wikipedia redesign, currently available on the French and Portuguese versions.
In 2019, Wikimedia’s web team began the herculean task of revamping the layout for the first time in a decade, with the goal of making the site more welcoming to internet users today, regardless of their language and their location. “Despite how simple the website seems, there is a lot of complexity — both in terms of the code, as well as many nuanced workflows and locally customized elements — to learn about,” Alex Hollender, Lead UX Designer in Product Design at Wikimedia wrote in 2021. The new design is currently available on the French and Portuguese versions of Wikipedia, and will be rolled out across all of Wikipedia by the end of the year.
What developers and code enthusiasts can learn from Wikipedia
The fact that Wikipedia has gone largely unchanged in 21 years is a testament to the early decisions of the founders, developers, and UX designers that built it. Whatever your thoughts on the platform, it’s undeniable that it’s an integral part of many people’s experience gathering information on the internet — and perhaps, more importantly, it’s a repository for the passions of countless contributors who take pride in the thankless task of maintaining the world’s first crowd-sourced encyclopedia. On an increasingly noisy, individualized internet, it’s a reminder that, yes, we can have nice things.
Want to gain the skills that helped Wikipedia’s developers create an innovative and lasting product? Here are the courses and languages to learn:
Learn JavaScript: Wikipedia’s front-end is written in JavaScript. This course covers the fundamentals that you need for front-end or back-end development.
Learn PHP: Wikipedia’s back-end server-side software is PHP. In this course, you’ll learn how PHP is used in building dynamic web applications.
Introduction to UI and UX Design: Learn design principles that make websites like Wikipedia effective. In this course, you’ll get experience wireframing and prototyping your own product in Figma.
Learn Git & GitHub: Get started contributing to open-source software by learning how to use GitHub’s command line language, Git.
In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.
In the early aughts, while teenagers were busy copying HTML/CSS snippets for their Myspace layout and deciding which friends earned a place in their “Top 8,” Anton Röhm was just a toddler. Now, the 20-year-old from Germany is the programmer behind the fully functioning Myspace re-creation, called SpaceHey.
Anton built SpaceHey for fun during the pandemic, and the website took off on TikTok and Twitter with people claiming, “Myspace is back!” From the unassuming fonts to the primitive blogging feature, Anton took extra care to capture the essence of the 2000s and make a convincing Myspace dupe.
“I was fascinated by Myspace, and I went down a rabbit hole with Wikipedia and archive.org,” Anton says. “I thought Myspace was pretty exciting, but sadly, I had never tried it.”
SpaceHey’s 500,000-plus community is a mix of former Myspace users soaking up the nostalgia, as well as Gen Zers who are keen to jump on another Y2K trend.
Building SpaceHey has given Anton a crash course in maintaining a website: “Since I launched SpaceHey in 2020, I’ve been working nonstop on it, like full-time,” Anton says. “The main work right now is keeping the servers up and running, because they’re always under a heavy load.”
Here, Anton shares how he coded SpaceHey, the unique ways people are using HTML/CSS on the site, and his theory about why this retro platform is making a comeback.
How’d you learn to code?
“I started when I was around like 13 or so, because I was always fascinated by computers and wanted to have my own website. I started with WordPress and just created WordPress blogs, and tried out different things with thousands of plugins. But at one point, I felt like I hit a wall.
I thought, Okay, I want to do this, but there’s no plugin to do it, so I Googled how to create my own plugin. I had to know PHP to create a WordPress plugin, but I didn’t know what PHP was, so I looked into it. Then I wanted to output text. How do I do that? I need to know HTML. What’s HTML?
So I never really thought to myself, Now I want to start learning to code. It just happened, and I Googled my way through it.”
How did you code SpaceHey?
“I started with just recreating the Myspace homepage with plain HTML and CSS — it was non-functional, but just the design. When that was done, I used PHP, because that’s the first programming language I used, and that’s the one I know the best. I wanted to get it started as quickly as possible.
I started to make the homepage functional, with all the links, and the signup form. I made the whole authentication system, built the database, and all that stuff. SpaceHey is written in plain PHP with no frameworks, plain HTML and CSS, and JavaScript. I use a bit of jQuery for the messenger, but that’s it.”
What sort of research did you do to accurately recreate Myspace’s design aesthetic and features?
“Mainly looking at screenshots, old YouTube videos, screen recordings, and archive.org, which has some Myspace pages archive. But apart from the homepage, I couldn’t really find screenshots for all of the features Myspace had. So most of the pages I designed myself and thought, Okay, how could it have looked like and felt like back then? I was just trying it out — and I kind of got it right.”
Anton’s SpaceHey profile.
Can people make custom layouts with CSS like you could on Myspace?
“That’s one of the main aspects! I felt that Twitter and Instagram limited how I express my creativity, because every profile basically looks the same, so I wanted to bring layouts back.
Just like the old MySpace, customizable layouts are a big deal on SpaceHey.
Myspace was famous for the custom layout. In SpaceHey, you’re allowed to insert custom HTML and CSS into your profile, and you can just paste whatever you want — of course, it’s filtered to exclude things that could be harmful, like no JavaScript, or no iframes*. You can basically go wild and make your own profile your own space. I also have a layout section right on SpaceHey where people can create layouts and share them with others, so if you don’t know how to code, you can just copy the snippets from there.”
*While these languages aren’t innately dangerous, limiting the site to just HTML/CSS prevents things like cross-site scripting (XSS), which is a vulnerability that occurs when a web application returns unsanitized input to the front end of an application.
In this case, a malicious actor would inject harmful code on their web page to execute when a person goes to their profile, explains Nik Stern, Curriculum Developer at Codecademy. We actually have a course on Defending Node Applications from SQL Injection, XSS, & CSRF Attacks that explains how to protect your sites from cyberattacks.
What are some ways people are customizing their profiles?
“When you give the people the opportunity to code their own layouts and their own profiles, they’ll be incredibly creative. They’re creating profiles now that I never thought was possible with just CSS and HTML.
For example, I’ve found profiles that mimic the aesthetics of Windows XP and Windows operating systems. They have a boot-up screen when you look at a page, without JavaScript — it’s just CSS with the startup sound from YouTube embedded. One woman created a layout using just CSS with a ton of Polaroid pictures surrounding the page, a wood background, a notebook in the middle, and a handwriting font — it’s incredible. It’s crazy what they can do with just so little code.”
A layout that a SpaceHey member created using just CSS.
Besides the nostalgia, why do you think people are still so attached to Myspace?
“It’s the complete opposite of modern social media, because there are no algorithms to test content, there’s no feed or ‘for you page,’ and it’s only web-based, so there are no notifications or news to keep your attention for hours.
I think that’s the main reason why people want to feel nostalgic — and that’s working really well. People just go on it, make real connections with people, comment on their pages, create pages with their own code. When they’re done, they log out and log back in the next day. It’s a much healthier experience, in my opinion.”
Do you want to pursue web development as a career?
“Web development is really fascinating to me, but on the other hand, what I’ve learned with SpaceHey is that it’s so much more with server administration and DevOps, which is also really exciting. I’m unsure what path I want to choose, but right now I have to do everything on my own for SpaceHey. It’s really fun to learn all the aspects, with clients, the back-end servers, the caching — everything.”
What’s your plan for the future of SpaceHey?
“Currently, most of the SpaceHey costs are coming from my own pocket. The servers are sadly getting more and more expensive as the user base grows. I don’t have a huge budget to throw AWS [Amazon Web Services] or something at it.
So what I’m doing right now to support the costs is I have a shop where people can order SpaceHey stickers, and I’ll mail them — and they can pay any amount they want, be it 9 or 90 euros, I don’t care.
On the other hand, that’s not nearly enough to keep it running for the foreseeable future, so I’m looking into sponsorships or putting a small ad on the homepage or something like that. But it’s really hard to find companies to do this without wanting to track everything — because I really don’t like all the personalized advertisements. I don’t want that on SpaceHey.”
Want to relive your Myspace days or just pick up some new coding skills? Learn how to use code to customize a web page (or just make a cool Myspace layout) with our courses Learn HTML and Learn CSS — you might be surprised by how much you remember. If you want to understand what it takes to make a website dynamic and responsive, check out our beginner-friendly Learn JavaScript course. Be sure to check out the rest of our Web Development courses to learn how code powers the most iconic websites and apps on the internet.
As we prepare for the start of another academic school year, now is an excellent time to think about how to include inclusive teaching practices in your course. There is no one right way to use inclusive teaching practices in your course. Instead, inclusive teaching involves a deeper understanding of the interaction between the needs of your students, the content of the course, and the environment you’re teaching in. This digest provides a collection of resources and guides to explain research and examples of inclusive teaching practices.
This accessible and informative article focuses on ways to motivate and engage Black students. The authors provide 5 strategies supported by research on inclusive teaching: Offer students voice and choice, use collaborative learning, practice “warm demanding”, tap the power of dynamic instruction, and create meaningful partnerships with families.
