Emily Babay

It’s no secret among my friends at The Daily Pennsylvanian that I’ve had a hard time dealing with the fact that my term as an editor is over. But after two years of 40-plus hours a week at that office, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that I’m having troubles transitioning back to life as a normal Penn student.

About one day after my successor started managing the site, I realized that one thing I was going to miss a lot was having a web site that I could look at and feel like it was “my” site. You know the rest: emilybabay.com was born.

When I started this site, I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to pull it off. I had no real web development experience. But I’ve also started a lot of projects at the DP not quite knowing how to do them. I wanted to try modifying some of the CSS and PHP code myself. I’m still not completely sure what each line means, but most changes I wanted to make — like having the sidebar appear on pages, in addition to posts, or adding the search bar to the top right corner — I could figure out what to do.

This site was created mostly through trial-and-error. I had occasional assistance from Emily Ingram‘s “how to build a portfolio site” series, Dan (the DP’s always helpful lead online developer) and, of course, Google.

The site is still under development (and I’ll always be open to new ideas), so any and all comments/feedback are welcome. E-mail me at emily@emilybabay.com.

During my term as The Daily Pennsylvanian’s online editor, I managed our social media accounts on on Twitter and Facebook.

Over the course of the year, traffic to the DP’s web site from Facebook increased by nearly 200 percent. Twitter was rarely used before 2009, and became one of the top referring sites to thedp.com during my tenure as editor.

I used Twitter extensively to report on breaking news events, such as a shooting on campus and a fire in a dorm, while also writing articles for the web site.

During my internship at the World-Herald, I compiled information on Fourth of July celebrations in Omaha and throughout Nebraska, and managed an online map with the location and details of each.

The map was updated multiple times during the week before Independence Day, and can be viewed here.