iSean

I learned HTML by playing with code that was already created. This is probably not too unlike most people. When I wanted to move beyond HTML, I learned CSS the same way. However, some things I never took the time to learn because I could just squeak by if I just got the gist of them. For example, on this blog there is a lot of PHP code in various places. I have learned enough to move menus around and to add sections (e.g., my one banner add on the right). MySQL and PHPmyAdmin . . . same thing. Sure, I screw up, but I get it figured out for the most part. I feel confident that I would have spent far more time really learning than I spend trying to figure out how to tweak and fix things when I mess up.

One thing that I have meant to learn is JavaScripting. It’s not difficult and it can really extend HTML on websites. Like many other Internet-related tools, I fiddled with javascript and learned just enough to tweak. And, that brings me to my dilemma today. In my weekly survey with my students two weeks ago, I noticed a comment about how difficult it was to read black text on a white background. So this past week, I added a question for all of my students asking whether they wanted alternatives to to the standard style for pages that I use. About 25% requested something different and about 75% of those students wanted a dark-based background with light text.

And this takes me back to the problem I now have with how I’ve done things. I have had a family website since the 1990s. I registered our last name and have kept a journal (mostly about my kids) for the grandparents and other family and friends. We get A LOT of hits on this site. In the old days, I used this site for experimentation (now, my atticmooses site is for testing, but somehow I snuck my blog on here instead of my professional site???). For the first many years, the whole family site was coded in HTML. I used BBEdit to write all of my html. Somewhere along the way, I discovered Dreamweaver and that’s been my tool of choice (or a combo) ever since. In 2001 or so, I switched to PostNuke (a Content Management System). And, just last month, I converted it all and switched to WordPress (same as this blog). That being said, when the site was all HTML-based, I added a neat feature that would allow my users to go to a control panel-like page and choose 1 of 4 styles for the whole website. I used Javascript to set a cookie and the chosen style would last for as long as they visited my site, but they could also change it any time. This took a bit of time to figure out.

And therein lies my problem. I no longer have the code I used. I have to sit down and research things and try and figure it all out again. Of course, Google back then versus Google today is no contest. I’ll likely do a search and find something that will guide me or greatly assist my efforts much easier than it happened back then. But, it sure would have been nice to have kept that old code because it’s exactly what I am going to be doing for my students right now. My class sites are made with HTML and CSS only. I just don’t like “systems” for this content as I feel a bit constricted by the limitations (e.g., I like everything students need each week on one, easy to view webpage in a numbered, annotated list). For the time being, I am creating two pages for the webpages that have a lot of reading and I provide two links. Each pages is the same except they link to different stylesheets (a light and a dark). My fingers are crossed that I can get this figured out quickly.

Tags: Javascript, CSS, stylesheets, HTML