Hi readers! I’m checking in again after a little more than a week to give some updates on my learning progress. I’m happy to report that I’ve finished reading and working through the HTML for the People book published by Blake Watson including his optional chapter on CSS. I’ve started the optional chapter on PHP and am planning to have finished it by the end of the month.
Watson’s writing and teaching methods really vibed with me. On past occasions that I’ve tried to learn HTML, I’ve tended to lose interest quickly because I don’t see the applicability of the exercised that are presented. Rather than spending a lot of time on a generic “Hello World” page or working with lorem ipsum text, you start almost immediately working on a personal webpage. He also moves quickly to make the distinction between using HTML to tag “what” an element is and then using style definitions to add specific formatting to those elements. As someone who has been fighting with Microsoft Word’s style options for the past several months, I fell in love with how much control one can have in HTML with very little effort.
I came into this effort with a goal to create a place that I can express myself online that is completely my own. The last two decades of the social internet and template-based webhosting have flattened personal expression and enriched some of the absolute worst people. I hope that my experiment with HTML will encourage more of you to consider giving your own website a try. It really is simpler than you could possibly believe. Let’s take the internet back for the people.
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