My Beginning Web

Today was a very long day for me. I spent a bit of time trying to clean up the slowly dwindling pile of stuff in my living room. Somewhere in there I got to actually jump on the computer and update some things. Yet again I let the advice of a friend steer me away from my original intent (though I can understand why).

My co-worker today stated his opinion that a web page that is truly basic HTML should also include the doctype. Now this is not necessarily true in my opinion. Pretty much every site or book I've seen has not included doctype until later (doctypes didn't really come into use until HTML 4.0 anyhow). Sure, it is something all webpages should have, but not something that's absolutely required to get a page to render. In fact, I could just make a page with no tags on it, type a few lines, save as whatever.html and it will render if I opened it up in a web page (don't believe me, try it for yourself).

Now, if you want to follow the standards though, you need the doctype. Doing like I described above is like spelling phonetically (fonetikalee) and using sucky grammar. Sure you will still be understood, but is it the standard? No, so I can see his point, but I also wanted to just stick with the basics.

Anyhow, If you really want to conform to standards, you also need a couple of other elements to get it to clear the validator on the W3C website. I'll explain these in my lessons later (maybe have to push my lessons on lists back yet again). At any rate, in order to teach things the right way from the start, I'm stepping out on a limb and including in doctypes in my lesson for today. I had a couple of other things I wanted to say about the history of HTML, so I figured I'd just slide that in there. I also have gone back and made some small revisions to my other lessons.

For those of you in the other side of the globe and a day ahead of me, Happy New Year and see you next year, same blog, same Justin.

- Justin

Today I went ahead and decided to break up the next HTML lesson and just concentrate on lists as a whole rather than do basic lists, links and images together. I got started on the page and I'll finish tomorrow since I only had a few hours rest last night. Hard to think about what I want to say and how to do it like that. You should see the link up by mid-day tomorrow. Make sure to take a look and tell me what you think. Hopefully the lessons are not too dry and actually teach something.

For myself, today I went and checked out my Facebook fan page for the site. Lo and behold, there were my posts on the wall. I wonder if there's just some kind of slow replication issue or not, but it did finally show. I tried getting this to work for several days now and it was really bothering me. Well, I can't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Today I read more on Blogging for Dummies. It's got some good ideas on how to set up a blog and lots of examples. I think I'll try some of them out. I'll expand on this more soon. For now it's not teaching me more than I already know. So far I've gone through an intro to blogs, what software to use, setting it up to include hosting, finding my subject, some basic code and customization, blog etiquette, etc. Fairly basic, but lots of little things here and there that I didn't know. I think the book is great for someone who's never made a blog before (I learned the hard way, but at least I'm a fast learner).

I also went today and picked up Web Editor Professional. It purports to be just as, if not more powerful than Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression. So when I get more up to speed on my coding skills by hand, I can use that to speed up the process. I'll make sure to do a good evaluation for you once I do start using it.

- Justin

Remember me discussing my ongoing saga with getting my WordPress blog posts to my Facebook fanpage? After trying several plugins, with pretty much nil result, I finally found something that works. At first I found a plugin that showed my FB status, and had a nice feed to update my status there from my blog. I even found a plugin that had a button to post each blog there, but it went to my personal page. There were a couple that purported to do what I wanted, but didn't seem to work (you had to do some fairly complex editing of some of the PHP scripts too).

Well it was so much easier to do than I imagined. Here it is at the Traffic is King site. It's very well explained too. I think there was a video as well on the WordPress site, but I lost that link. So, what I found though is that after following the steps on that site, the RSS feed goes right to your notes section of whatever page you designated (my fan page for me). It also does an initial import of my current postings to my wall there. Any new posts though will go to your notes tab. The hope is to have the contents of my notes tab go to my wall so fans can see the postings immediately. Until then I have an RSS feed box going.

- Justin

• Justin posted on January 17, 2010
  Not a problem. Glad it was of help to you. I look forward to you coming back more.
• WP Themes posted on January 17, 2010
  Good post and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you as your information.

Today I decided to finally stop procrastinating and get my tutorials section started. At this point in time, I have three portions to this site. The blog (you're reading it), the exemplar site (main site in the blog roll) where I utilize what I've learned, and now the tutorial section. This new section is where I will teach back, so to speak, the various things I have learned (which so far is basic HTML). So as I learn, I will add to that section.

Plans are currently to move on from basic to intermediate and then advanced HTML. Next up will be CSS and then PHP. I also look forward to lessons on how to use these elements in beefing up your blog as I do so in mine. Finally I will move on to more advanced topics like Javascript, jquery, MySQL and so on (cause the list seems to never cease).

Lastly, I want to send a shout out to my special friends in Russia, who have decidedly shown an interest in my site recently. Thanks for the nice comments (I am stripping the spam out though).

- Justin