Hodgepodge 205/365 - Coding

The code for today's
"final project": I'd post
the outcome, but it's
not scalable so doesn't
really translate. Imagine
some headings, a few
photos, and some simple
lists. That's what all this says.

About six years ago, and again a couple of years before that, I took a class at our community college on HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets), to learn about web design. It was fun. I love that sort of thing: it's part planning, part problem-solving, part language, part attention to detail, part visual outcome.

But it was also tedious: an eighteen-week class, a couple of hours twice a week— sometimes it just crawled, what with demos and exercises and focus-focus-focus on one bit of code at a time. By my standards (I'm not especially smart, but I am Teutonically quick), it could have gone twice the speed, or faster, and we'd've ended up with twice the learning (or more). But alas, the course was not designed to my specs.

Today I started an eight-week on-line (so, self-paced) class, as a refresher and, hopefully, also an extender—into such mysterious realms as Command Line Interface (CFI) and GitHub, JavaScript and jQuery. When the email arrived saying the class content was up, I went there immediately—and managed to work my way through all of week 1, oh so happily! It was a good review of elements I'd learned already, so it's not like I was tackling anything new. But I was tickled, when four o'clock rolled around and I'd finished the "final project" for the week, at how engrossed I'd been for the previous six hours.

I'm sorely tempted just to start week 2 tomorrow. CSS. Also a refresher (though less so: I'm much shakier on CSS than on HTML). The instruction is available. But . . . I shall exercise patience. And wait until next Monday.

My goals in this are to become more conversant with the coding behind any website, but especially WordPress, where I intend to create a personal site and (perhaps) also revamp the Monterey County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue team website, which I administer (ahem—mostly ignore) and which I'd like to update. It's a very old design (not mine)—way pre-HTML5: it doesn't even shrink and expand to fit a page—and the photos are about ten years old, and . . . it just needs some (a lot of) work. I figure it will be a good already-existing entity to practice on.

Just another seven weeks now! When I'll be completely fluent in all things web design–related. (Ha ha. A girl can dream.)

For my class six years ago, we had to come up with three possible designs for the website we might create. Here are my three, for a personal web page. I don't especially like any of them now (if any of them, the middle one, but with numerous tweaks and changes, especially to the header); now, I'd go for something much cleaner, much less fussy. But I have to admit, it was fun, at the time, to piece these landing pages together in Photoshop—and dream of the website that one day might be.

. . . One day will be. I'm back to dreaming. And learning.