Packrat's Blog Center
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Learning to be a webmaster
A lot of nerd stuff belowMy first time touching HTML was in high school.
What I wrote back then was impressively bad, and there was one incident that put this on full display. I wanted borders, and how I decided to accomplish that was to carefully surround an element with no less than four divs all carefully sized and positioned to achieve the effect.
Obviously I've come a long way in my front end design, and with no small amount of help from 3 books in particular:
- Niederst,J.(2002).HTML Pocket Reference.O'Reilly Media
- Meyer,E.A.(2018).CSS Pocket Reference.O'Reilly Media
- Flanagan,D.(2012).JavaScript Pocket Reference.O'Reilly Media
I can't overstate how helpful these books are. Details may be left out at times, but, with a web search, the knowledge holes are quickly filled. It may be worthwhile to look at later editions of these books.
I wanna talk about the programs I use to make this site happen.
Planning turned out to be very important
As with any project with a lot of moving (or even static) parts, starting with an abstracted plan saves a lot of time wasted screwing up or making functional changes. I did this with a notepad and drawing squares in krita. Krita isn't required, of course, any paint program can work, though if you're a foss cultist like I am, krita is a good general use option, except, of course, for image editing.
Gimp was intimidating enough for me to avoid it for years in favor of krita until very recently.
This site went through a dozen iterations before landing on a color scheme and layout I was happy with.
This site was hand-written in vim with love
Vim is what I use to write anything that's not GdScript. There's nothing wrong with using notepad++ or whatever else. Even Microsoft Notepad won't make me hate you. I'm accepting of all text editors and most IDEs, but know nothing's going to stop me from continuing to use vim to make changes to this site.
Admittedly, I don't know a lot to make full use of vim. There is a chance that contributes to why versions of this site take so long to push out.
It definitely does
Firefox has a million tools for learning
Go to a simple site and just start poking at its source. Hit F12 and start exploring. It's actually a lot of fun seeing how websites tick.
If you're interested in a part in particular, then left click it and hit Inspect. Left click and hit View Page Source to see the whole .html file in another tab.
On top of this peeking functionality, they have docs that helped me quite a bit.
After singing their praises for a whole paragraph, I want to take a moment to disclaim any mozilla zealotry I might be accused of. I think most are aware now they have issues like everybody else.
Maybe other browsers have this functionality too, that's for their users to figure out
These assets aren't mine, or most are not.
The font for example is home-brewed after a couple hours learning how Font Forge works with zero prior knowledge of what a font really is besides an abstract idea a file telling programs how a character should be drawn. I know it still needs work.
Most images featured are textures pulled from repositories around the internet:
- Texturecan with all its repository contents made available under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universe License.
- Background camoflauge image in particular is from FreeCreatives. The legality of using assets found here is unclear. Their "About" page will not load, nor will the "Contact Us" page. If this image is your property, please email me before sueing me, I'll be more than happy to stop using it.
