My Beginning Web

Today I have been working on my forms lesson that I did not get to complete. Now I didn't want leave you all hanging, so I thought I'd update you on my progress. The other subjects have been very easy up to now. I think so far forms are the hardest part of basic HTML. I have a lesson with the HTML and showing a complete form, but before I publish it, I want to get my head around some of the attributes involved, the tags are fairly simple to get.

Unfortunately, I have had my plate full the last couple of days with beginning of the year work and personal stuff so I haven't had the time I want to get this pumped out. Nonetheless, I am over 75% complete on the lesson. To be honest, I'd rather have a page where I can fully explain everything from a point-of-view that I truly understand what I'm teaching before I teach it. Otherwise, I'm just droning out lessons with examples and no real understanding or background to go with it.

So how about you tell me about your experience with forms. Have you used them before and what did you use them for? Did you find them easy or difficult to understand?

At any rate, I am certain I'll have the forms lesson up tomorrow. After that comes a page demonstrating all the lessons up to this point in one example followed by my CSS series. Hang in there and see you tomorrow.

- Justin

Today I did up a nice lesson on tables. I covered the <table>, <tr>, <td>, <th> and <caption> tags. I also talked about the border, colspan and rowspan attributes. Pretty simple. I gave lots of good examples.

Honestly not a lot to talk about. I hope you enjoyed my post on hacking and I hope everyone is getting something out of my lessons and posts. Take a look at the lesson and tell me what you think. Again, I'm all ears to suggestions and comments. Tomorrow's lesson will be on basic forms (so darn much to learn). See you then.

- Justin

Hello again! I have been thinking today of some of the sites I went to in the past to learn more about web sites, web design and the internet in general. One of those sites was www.hackthissite.org.

I'm sure we all have seen some of the hit hacking type movies like Swordfish (2001) with Hugh Jackman starring (not to mention Halle Berry) or Hackers (1995) with Angelina Jolie in it. Both were very good movies in my opinion because they spark the imagination. It gets kids interested in learning more about computers. It still reminds me of the days when I was a teen thinking I could hack a computer just by typing in some random gibberish.

At any rate, all the fantasy stuff aside, hacking is a serious issue. Every day we see tons of reports on hacking and certain people blaming other certain people for hacking. It's also scary because you can lose your privacy and become a victim of fraud. Basically, I highly recommend learning about hacking and the basics of it, not to be able to hack, but to learn how to protect yourself. You may not be able to stop a pro, but you can at least defend against what a lot of people call "kiddie hackers," who just do it for fun, or stop a low key thief.

Learning hacking also gets you a better idea of how the system works. You learn more about HTML code and the inner workings of the internet in general. You can pick up a good book or two on the subject like Hacking for Dummies or Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (go to my Amazon.com store under the Blogroll heading if you are interested in picking up either book). I also recommend checking out hackthissite.org because there are lots of good training programs from basic to advanced that can teach you more about HTML and what you shouldn't do when making a website.

- Justin

Today I covered links, images and some basic formatting in my lesson of the day. This is very necessary because links are what HTML was really designed for way back in 1991. The idea of images came not further down the road with the development of the Mosaic web browser and HTML 1.0.

So the things I covered were the <a> (anchor) and <img> (image) tags to make links and images with in pages and how to use images as links themselves. I also talked about how to use links to email people. I mentioned the href (hypertext reference) and src (source) attributes. I touched on how to link to a specific spot in either the same or a different web page with the name attribute.

In formatting, I covered a little more of the use of the <p> (paragraph), the <br /> (break) and the <pre> (preformatted) tags. I also hit on the use of the <strong> and <em> tags for making specific words bold or in italics. However I recommended reserving CSS for major formatting of lines and paragraphs.

Take a look at the page and tell me what you think. If you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to ask. Also let me know if you think you like my lessons and how I can improve on them. Well, it's getting late. I'll be hitting on the table tags tomorrow. See you then.

- Justin