It has again been a while since I posted anything to this site, but this time with good reason. At the time of my last post, I was 70% percent-is through my Codecademy HTML & CSS course. I'd used what I'd learnt up to that point to build out this site. I had a homepage, a separate page for blog entries, and a handful of posts. I'd worked out what the sitemap of the site should look like and was ploughing ahead with building it. Things were looking good!

And then I hit a bit of a wall. Some of the layouts I planned didn't really work. Or they would half-work but I didn't quite have the skills to work them through to where they looked quite right. The odd flex box wouldn't quite behave as I wanted it to. Or it would, but then it wouldn't look right on a mobile screen. Some of the elements I'd built needed manually updating everytime I duplicated a blog entry (because I'm not using a CMS) and generally both my css and html, although largely functional looked a bit of a mess in my code editor, and I was losing track of what bit of css was operating on which html element, and as I made changes the effect was just compounding.

So I did what any sane, normal person would do and methodically went through each line of code for each page and carefully rewrote either and checked it step-by step…. no, seriously, of course I didn't!

I just deleted everything (apart from the blog entry content) and started over from scratch.

So what you see now is the work of the last couple of weeks, an hour here and there in the evening, slowly plugging my way through it all. Every page was rebuilt from scratch, giving me the chance to tidy up both my html and css codes, and make it look readable, and presentable, and most importantly I can now see more clearly what it all does. Behind the scenes I've tidied up the file structure for the site to make that a bit more sustainable as I add stuff.

So now it all pretty much works, and although simple it looks … sort of okay?

Well, look, it doesn't look quite like what it looks like in my minds eye, but that's okay. I think that's only natural at this point. Of course my ambition for what it could look like is far outweighing my ability to create it, but for now I'm okay with that. After all, it's here right? A website made from scratch - when 3 months ago I didn't know a selector from an element.

That learning has really been all part of the enjoyment and satisfaction of building this. I've finished that Codecademy course now. I'd say it taught me enough to build maybe 80% of this site, which I think is pretty good for an introductory course. What's been a real curve - and a positive one - is finding out just how many really, really good resources there are out there if you're looking to learn this stuff yourself. From huge resources like W3Schools, to sites like CSS Tricks, whenever I come across a stumbling block, there's been somewhere to turn to for the answer. I guess that's the beauty of the web, and nothing new, but has been really rewarding in this context.

So that's it really, the sites up and running, and I can write what I want. I can continue to learn, and experiment here with what I learn.

What's not to like?