I’m sitting in the Barnes and Noble near my house where I used to work. That’s not directly related to this post, but it is a part of me, my space.
Something Goldberg talks about in Writing Down the Bones that if you don’t know where to start, start with where you are.
I am sitting in a building that didn’t just pay my salary, didn’t just fuel my love for books, it fueled my love for computers.
You see, used to be, the best way to get information on computers, to learn a new language or program was to buy a book. A big tome of a book that weighed in at $50 and sometimes if you were lucky came with a CD.
It was here i got the books i used to learn HTML, JavaScript, CSS. Perl and PHP. I got my first Linux book here (Red Hat 4.0).
All the things I used to build websites for fun and profit. I used to give HTML lessons at the info dest using pen and paper. I got a programming gig because I knew the answers, and helped them find books.
And it was from here, from those books, many of which I still have, that I found WordPress and re-built my website from a static site I updated occasionally to a dynamic site with a database that I updated occasionally.
This WordPress mess has me thinking again about websites, and how we make them, and how we go about learning what do to put them together.
Someone made the comment that we ‘don’t open up notepad.exe and write them by hand anymore these days’ and I thought, but… why not?
And I don’t mean e-commerce, or social media. I don’t mean the complicated sites that we use like Google Docs.
I mean, our sites. Our personal sites.
I’ve coded more sites by hand than the average person, even the average website having person. I used to do it for a living (yes, I used notepad.exe) and had many of my own things online made that way.
I’ve been looking into Jekyll for a static site generator. It is nice, has lots of functionality, and in no way is easier than writing things by hand. It is just writing things by hand for a specific program.
I will say it is easier than converting a site by hand for sure, especially if you are a nerd like me and already write your posts in markdown before you post them.
This isn’t a call to go back to the HARD way of making sites. This is rather a request to re-assess what is actually the HARD way.
This is just rambling at this point. Perhaps it is the caffeine. I’ve nearly finished a quick tutorial on HTML which I hope to post soon, just to show that it is simple to create.
I think we have it in our heads that a website must be grand and have things like hamburger menus and whatever that slidy thing does, and whatnot.
And in the end, we are there to read what you write. Maybe watch your video, or listen to your song. (Certainly NOT click on any ads)
And really, it could be just like we are. A work in progress, a little scatter brained, perhaps with mismatched socks.