How This Disaster Helped Prepare Me For My Curent Vocation

[ This is part 4 of an 8-part article - Read Part 1... ]

Diary-X was gone, but my Diary habit was well-developed, and I really missed it! I tried making my own site, but the dynamic nature of diary entries made it impossible for me, as all I had were HTML/CSS skills and no programming skills to make something work dynamically.

I tried a couple of different options for self-hosted installations of blogging software, and wound up liking WordPress best. WordPress is a wonderful, beautiful, clean blogging/content management application that gets installed on your own web server. It’s easy to install and has a web-based dashboard where you can write new blog entries with the newest entry appearing first on the front page of the blog. Every time you create a new entry, the new one appears on top, dynamically! It also automatically creates archives by month, categories, tags, etc.

The way WordPress does this is by combining HTML, CSS and a new (to me) ingredient: PHP. PHP is a programming language created specifically to affect, organize and render web pages in HTML and CSS.

So I had one more thing to learn! You don’t need to know PHP (or even HTML or CSS) to write entries in your WordPress blog. But if you want to configure or create your own theme and make customizations to widgets and the layout, understanding at least a little bit about PHP is necessary and a strong understanding of HTML and CSS is critical.

And I wanted to have my own theme for my blog. Boy did I! It was a pride thing – no pre-fab themes for this self-taught handcoder who works in notepad and considers Dreamweaver and Front Page to be products of the devil!

Anyway, struggling through, and eventually learning, the ins and outs of WordPress as pertains to PHP and paths to the theme and how the widgets and plugins work really started to give me an edge when it came to all things WordPress. I even gained some some web server knowledge and understanding that helped me troubleshoot some frustrating issues when it came to upgrades and other problems that would pop up.

ACCIDENTALLY FINDING A NEED AND FILLING IT [READ PART 5]. . .

Evolving My Skills

[ This is part 3 of an 8-part article - Read Part 1... ]

Eventually I got divorced and had a great need to generate some extra income. A friend of mine suggested I go back to doing web sites, but things had advanced so much that my design/coding was looking really dated. CSS was all the rage, all of a sudden, and I didn’t know it at all. And I guess my faith in my ability to teach myself new skills had waned a bit.

But my friend really pressed me to give it a shot, so I built a few basic sites in CSS, and just did like I did when I learned HTML. I immersed, analyzed and absorbed. Then came the practice and practical application and voila – I had the foundation of a new skill set.

Something else that was happening at the same time was that I was keeping a diary on a web site called Diary-X. I had been doing so for about 5 years when the server running Diary-X had a catastrophic hard drive failure and every diary on that site was just suddenly *gone* never to return.

HOW THIS DISASTER HELPED PREPARE ME FOR MY CURRENT VOCATION [READ PART 4]. . .

Then Came The Internet

[ This is part 2 of an 8-part article - Part 1 ]

In 1993 I got my first computer. I got access to the internet via Prodigy Classic, and Prodigy Classic went from being just e-mail and bulletin boards to actually having a www browser in about 1995. And if you wanted to, you could have your very own web page! Oh my gosh!

I wanted to make my own web page in the worst way. I don’t even know why. But this was suddenly my new thing. I was the first of everyone I knew to have my own page. I started simple, then added and expanded whenever I learned something new.

I started by viewing the source of the page and immersing, analyzing and absorbing the HTML. Then applying it and experimenting with it. Then I learned how to add graphics, make links – very simple stuff, but no laymen knew how to do these things back then.

Soon after I started Fluffy Net. This was an idea my sister and I had – a web site where every pet could have its own home page! We had the idea to add a list of No-Kill Pet Shelters, organized by state. The web page for pets idea never took off, but Fluffy Net has been popular for the no-kill shelter list for about 12 years now.

I created several web sites over the next several years but none really as popular as Fluffy Net. A lot of things happened in my personal life, and I didn’t really keep up with internet trends as far as design goes, and things got away from me a bit.
EVOLVING MY SKILLS [READ PART 3]. . .