Tracking my progress on learning the skills I need to make this blog including program languages, design layouts, and art-based stuff.
16 Dec 2024
I learned the bare basics of html. Nothing fancy as of yet. I'm writing notes in my common notebook, and I only written down up to "Tags, Attributes and Elements" from htmldog.com. Further than that, I have a good grasp up to headings. I've been copying pasting link and image codes, but I would like to better understand that.
18 Dec 2024
I'm reading and taking notes for the rest of the beginner section at HTML Dog. I might just take a look at the intermediate level for funsies. I get impatient when writing notes when I really want to learn a certain thing, so I look ahead. I want to be able to code a basic website.
For some reason the code to navigate you around this page is changing all of the paragrpahs to "h2" sized font. I don't know what I'm doing wrong as I'm copying the code down. I must be missing something. I did consider changing the headings of the dates to a bigger size to the appropriate size compared to the paragraphs, but I thought it's another way to show where I am with coding at the moment.
I went ahead and copied the “Putting it all together” code and saved it. I figured that I'll understand whats on it when I get to the individual parts. I learned when I read what's on the bottom that CSS is for presentation. Then I went deeper to look at what JavaScript might be, and it listed it as interactivity.
Fun fact: As a writer, I tend to publish my work on mutliple platforms. I would write my story in a word document, and copy and paste into the other sites. It doesn't always keep my italics or bold, so I decided to add a bit of coding language into my stories, so that I'll see what I indended to emphasize. It's helpful.
I wasn't sure if I would be able to finish the beginner HTML turtorials today, but I managed to do it. Halfway through, taking notes started to become exhausting. I might be put out at learning code today, but I could play around with other stuff. I might do some of the images I want on the site. I planned (before I came to neocities and new the term) to design a splash image before entering my website, doodle around with it, post it for funsies, and whatnot.
8 Jan 2025
It's been a while, I know. I joined “The Ultimate BL Visual Novel Jam,” and I worked on it for a while, along with other projects I have. Still coding, but just a different language, sorta? I don't know enough about code to see similarities or differences.
I gotten some of the beginner CSS turtorial done. I need to write notes for text, margins and padding, and borders. In short, I'm about halfway through (might as well say three quarters of the way through, as the last two sections are short). I didn't start until later on in the day, and by the time 6 p.m. Rolled around, I got tired. Still, what I did try out look pretty cool, so I'm happy about my progress.
9 Jan 2025
Finally! I learned how to indent paragraphs! Lol, I don't like the paragraphs didn't have any, even if it's “not common” for a web page to have them. I refuse your reality, and substitute my own.
Anyway, I finished the beginner turtorial for CSS. I'm able to edit the text, color, and border of a webpage. I don't have it on my site today, because I started late doing my other projects along with chores, so I finished around 9 p.m. I'm not sure if I'll decide to update the look of my site tomorrow, but it all depends on how it goes.
I'm going to start on JavaScript beginner turtorial next. I already skimmed what I'm going to do, and I doubt I'm going to be utilizing what I learned from there onto this website. There are some things that I could potentially use, but what I have in mind relating to these aspects I would need to learn more about them.
23 Jan 2025
I went down quite the rabbit hole for the past two weeks. The first few days I avoided doing JavaScript, because I didn't feel like taking notes. Usually, when I do this, I would just skim, but this time, I took the time to reading it throughly and following along. HTML Dog wanted me to use the console developer feature to learn JavaScript. I could tell that learning it would take longer for me to understand compared to the beginning tutorials of HTML and CSS. Then, I looked into coding videos.
I didn't look up programming tutorials, just videos on the topic. Introductory-type Videos, how to best learn programming, “what I would've learned if I started over,” etc. One of the videos suggested freeCodeCamp. I gotten intrigued, because the tutorials were project based and it included certifications. It turned on the side of my brain that desired easy to track progress, and I explored it a bit, did the first section: Webpage design, and finished the first three lessons—with 94 steps. The website validated my thought that I should learn beginner, intermediate, and advanced tutorials on HTML and CSS before I learn JavaScript (this course structure is referencing HTML Dog, as freeCodeCamp doesn't structure their tutorials in this way).
I had some familiarity with div, id, and class elements. Throughout learning programming, I used chatGPT to code some projects I would like to learn to code in the future. If you ever been on sites like Wattpad, or Quotev, then you would know best what I mean. This website as a whole is a creative project for me, but I want to have a blog for research and content resume projects, and to showcase my writing, and fanfiction, and my art. I would like to be a freelancer one day, and I would like to source this website as a portfolio for any project I want to be a part of. I'm not at that level yet, I'm impatient, and I lose motivation easily, so seeing what I could potentially code is a visual inspiration board, so to speak.
I didn't take any notes while doing freeCodeCamp lessons, though. I still didn't feel like taking notes, and I also was overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to write notes from both HTML Dog and freeCodeCamp at the same time. “What are you talking about? That's so simple,” you might be thinking, and yeah, I know that figuring it out would be easy, but I'm a crazy person who wants things a specific way to the point where I'm struggling with something as simple as this. Don't judge me on how my brain works. I'll get to it eventually. Also, “Why take notes on both HTML dog and freeCodeCamp? Just pick one,” but each site teaches programming differently, and I like how both teaches for different reasons, and cross-referencing is benificial in learning, I would say. If I create a dialogue that you may or may not be actually thinking about then think of it as seeing into how my anxiety-ridden brain works, thus, futher explaining the stupidity of getting overwhelmed by something as simple as note taking, thank you.
I wanted to have the heading of the Website Project Log page color to go across the page, but when I tried coding it, the left side of the header had a space—a small one—and it drove me crazy. I made a brute-force solution, but it did the result I wanted. Maybe one day, I'll figure out a better way, or someone tells me the solution. My brother, who is a coder—not a webmaster—but is familiar with different programming languages (he does have a computer science degree), so he was able to help me. ChatGPT told me about the console thing, but he was the one who gave me more direct instruction on how to better utilize the feature. Thanks, bro bro!
I learned about article tags in freeCodeCamp and thought it's useful for my design layout for this log (and my blog, once I get it going). I used ChatGPT for the navigation and the placement of the entries, though. It's a relatively easy thing to read. I don't really want to use ChatGPT to code the layout of my site, as I want to use my knowledge of coding to set up my site, but I try not to ask it to do something crazy or something I don't understand myself. There were some code that I had that I didn't learn yet, but made some parts probably a little more pleasing to the eye, but I deleted it for this reason. This code: height: 100vh (the “vh” part of this code, not the height); and overflow-y: auto; is simple to understand what it does, but since I didn't learn it yet, I took it out.
I'm mostly settling on this design for right now, because I haven't updated this site for two weeks. It's not the end of the world if I don't update every two weeks, and maybe updating the layout when I used ChatGPT would be kinda iffy-feeling, but Imma do it anyways. My perfectionism took its toll on my goals for the longest time, so I'm trying to work against it. There's space in between the first entry of this log and my header when I set the navigation box to follow you as you scroll down the page, I brute-forced the position of the entries, and the header, but it looks okay for now. A big improvement from my first layout, which I saved a screenshot of in a project folder.
p.s. Just like when I learned how to style a paragraph in CSS so that each paragraph is indented, I'm happy that I also learned how to style a horizontal line. I don't know, I don't think I'm the only one who gets excited for the smallest things :3c