Frankly, working with HTML is something I’ve been doing on and off the last 15 years.
When I was a bored young teenager, I had my own Geocities domain which allowed me to create my own webpage full of stupid video game facts. Mind you, I had no idea what a stylesheet was (though neither did most of the internet, at that time), what good style meant, or even how to do most things related to making a website. But I had links, it had images (even GIFs!), it played MIDI music — it was pretty cool. I even had this little widget that I made that showed a random fact at the top of my website. I was proud of myself.
I showed my math teacher in 7th grade. He was in disbelief.
“You didn’t make this, you must have used software! How could you do this?”
So the next day I printed out the code on my Epson printer and showed it to him. It was something I was proud of, but it was incomprehensible to most people.
Flash forward to my first job out of college, working as a Project Manager for a digital marketing company. A client would put in a change request and instead of going through the proper channels of our web devs, my 7th-grade nerd-dom would try to fix it without their help. Obviously I know how that this is pretty irresponsible practice and a down right miserable way to operate, but I was young, had little oversight and wanted to fix things. I retaught myself HTML and picked up CSS very quickly.
The fun of tweaking some styles on a page doesn’t subside, really. It’s a real time canvas, and information is your medium.
I’ve made (parts) of my own site here. The style is mostly my own, though the shell of the layout was taken from some free template I found. I agonized over media queries (before I tackled Bootstrap) and making sure it looked great on all my phones.
Honestly, the work for this portion of the course was very easy. There were some basics I had to relearn, like display: and float:, because you just don’t deal with them when dealing with frameworks too-too much. But it was like riding a bicycle. It was like I was that 7th-grader again. And that’s the feeling I’m looking for if you read my first blog.
Looking forward to honing Ruby further next. Onward and upward.