brain games

A swirl of html tags, bits of javascript, a line or two of jQuery, and hundreds of css style elements swirled in my head making it almost impossible to do anything else. <DIV>s and <position=absolute>s snuck into my dreams… was I going mad? Or was it just the chaotic brain waves of learning something new.

Just over 8 years of retirement has left my brain sluggish and out of tune, but this website project is rekindling old skills and honing the brain just a little. In my working life, most of the work I did was ‘by the seat of my pants’... in other words, I learned how to do much of what I did by myself with little help from others. It was lonely, but it also meant that I got really good at figuring out how to do things on my own. I would look at source code from the products that I worked with, take it apart, and then build my programs with what I learned. I was never good at reading manuals, except to reference, but I was good at learning by doing.

A few days ago I thought I had the site all fixed and ready for data (after getting feedback from others about it), and then!!!! some sleuthing for something else landed me on a page that said that much of what I based my website on was deprecated for the next version of html. WTF!!! I was crushed. But then I pulled up my pants and got to work to figure it all out again.

Swearing, head banging, stalking around the house muttering to myself that “I can’t do this”, and then sitting back down and trying some more has finally netted a result. I think I have it working again, and this time with supported code. I just have 1 template page done, but everything else will use the same code, just the text and images will change. It will be easy to add data, and to make changes to the overall look of the site. I think it is better than what it was.

Some of the sites I hit said you’d be crazy to build a website by hand without using a development tool, well! Call me crazy but I’ve done it!

I do have to play around with a few css tags though so that I know for sure what each does. Positioning elements on a page is not straightforward and I might have fudged it a little bit.

So while all that is fun and good for me and my noggin, I’ve been having fun with amazon music. It is wonderful to listen to some new music and I’ve been loving some of the jazzy playlists. We haven’t been watching the videos as we’ve been out or busy almost every night since we signed up.

Let’s see… Saturday night Trudie & Leo came over, Sunday we watched Rick Steves, Monday Jo Ellen and Don came for supper so that we could celebrate Don & Carm’s birthday’s (burnt sugar cake!), Tuesday we watched stupid tv. The days have been a blur.

Well CRAP!!!! I just uploaded the site and tried to open it on my tablet… NOT. The formatting is all wonky and the first few things I tried did not work… so back to square one. One step forward… two steps back.

The crazy thing is that in my old ‘deprecated’ code everything worked well! I guess until the constructs are removed from HTML.

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
~T.H. White