I've mentioned in multiple past blog posts, I think, that I'm not a computer expert, that I'm not an experienced programmer or web designer, and that I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to setting up this website. That's all true, but I'm trying to make it less true. And to that end, I just finally completed a course on Udemy about HTML and CSS.
I should have completed this course a long time ago. I purchased the course way back in November 2020. But given my lamentable tendency toward procrastination and scattershottery, I didn't get around to actually starting the course until a few months ago, and finally got serious about finishing it just recently.
I already knew some HTML and CSS, of course. Heck, I couldn't have created this website if I didn't. But, well, just a glance at how the Wongery website currently looks should reveal the rudimentarity of my web design abilities.
[Once I get the news code working to show images, I'll include a screenshot of the Wongery homepage here, with the caption "It's not pretty.]
The Wongery website uses CSS, of course, but... not much of it. Not counting any stylesheets that come packaged with the MediaWiki and phpBB installations, which of course I didn't write and haven't modified, all the CSS used by the Wongery is in a single stylesheet of only eighty-nine lines. That's not much, and that's counting the blank lines between rules. There's nothing sophisticated there: borders and margins and padding and some simple font selectors and positioning. It's all very basic stuff, because that's all I knew how to do.
I made my first websites in the mid-nineties when HTML was new and CSS didn't exist yet. Even then, I wouldn't I'd say I was an expert, but at least I more or less knew my way around setting up a site. But there was a lot less then to know about it. Like I said, CSS didn't exist then, and HTML was much simpler than it is now; the tools for positioning elements on a website were primitive enough that it was common practice to painstakingly set up a page as a giant HTML table with various elements spanning rows and columns to get everything laid out as desired. Mobile accessibility certainly wasn't a thing; mobile phones were a thing but were still mostly just phones, and nobody was browsing the internet on them. And as tools and technology developed and the web evolved, I didn't keep up. I kept making websites using the old methods I did know, but I didn't adapt to the changing environment. Oh, I guess I did, a little; sure, I taught myself the very basics of CSS when it became obvious that CSS was pretty much a necessity for creating a website today. But I never went beyond the basics; I never really looked past what was needed for the task at hand and looked into what other possibilities existed.
Well, it's long past time for this old dog to learn some new tricks. So, like I said, I just completed a course on modern HTML and CSS... and wow, before taking this course, I didn't know just how much I didn't know. Media queries; flexboxes; CSS grids, variables, and transitions; these are all tools I now have available that I hadn't realized existed a few months ago. The Wongery website has badly needed an overhaul for a very long time, and now I finally have some of the tools I'll need to do it. Not today, and not tomorrow, but sometime before the hard launch I hope to make the Wongery look a heck of a lot better than it does now (admittedly a low bar to clear).
So does this mean I'll finally be able to update the method for making a blog post so I don't have to update the MySQL database manually with phpMyAdmin? Well... no, because that's not primarily an HTML and CSS thing; that's a PHP thing. Like CSS, I kind of taught myself the basics of PHP, enough to do what I had to do to get the Wongery code working, but I don't really know much more than that, and PHP is another topic I hope to learn more about. I should probably take a course or two on PHP at some point, too, but in the meantime, I have more than thirty other Udemy courses I've already purchased that I haven't completed, on subjects from Blender and JavaScript to orchestration and origami. And then there are other topics besides PHP I haven't bought courses on yet but maybe should, including Lua and using GitHub and I don't know; probably a lot of other things that aren't occurring to me right now.
I'm not learning all this just for the Wongery, of course; as I said in another recent blog post, I have a lot of other websites, too, and I have other projects I want to do. Still, certainly learning HTML and CSS will be very helpful for getting the Wongery site looking better, and all the time I've spent on that course should have benefits for the Wongery as well as for some other things I'm working on.
I've been berating myself for (among many other things) not getting any new Central Wongery articles up lately, and yes, I do want to get more articles up, but it's not like I've been neglecting the Wongery entirely. Again, the Wongery isn't the only reason I took that course on HTML and CSS, but it is a reason, and completing that course is contributing toward progress on the Wongery. The same goes for some other things I've been spending time on lately that I haven't been spending on writing articles, like reading through the rulebooks for RPGs that I hope to include stats for on the Wongery game pages.
One of the problems with having a lot of things I'm trying to get done is that even if I do spend time working on one of my projects, I still can't avoid feeling unproductive because of the other projects I'm not spending time on.
(I still probably should get some more articles up soon, though.)