I learned html in 1998 while attending a fly-by-night trade/night school for graphic design in San Francisco called Platt College. It was about a year and a half between me graduating and me getting a job doing graphic design at Kinko's in San Francisco's Financial District and just four months between there and me getting the job at National Geographic. Back then you wrote up html by hand in TextEdit and put it into BBEdit 4.0 which ran html4.
In the summer of 2005, after getting laid off from NGMaps, I acquired Dreamweaver and put together a very nice online portfolio that got me agency gigs. This semester, I have been taking IRLS475/575 with Martin Fricke and part of the workload has been taking online html courses in Codecademy. Codecademy was a good refresher in nesting my tags correctly, in making a table by hand and still keeping my tags correctly nested. Keeping one's tags neatly and correctly nested is really important. I had forgotten how to have an image map and make the images clickable by hand before last week.
Many of the tags seem to have changed since 1998, but I was game for setting up a one row, three column table by hand. This entailed typing everything out in my old friend TextEdit. This went nicely and I was able to keep my tags neatly nested by creating the beginning and end tags together and placing content within them.
When I realized I might want the text to line up with the pictures, I realized i was going to have to make the table two rows and three columns. Time being in short supply, I did this part in Dreamweaver, and maybe I should have done the whole project in Dreamweaver. I'm old, I think that there's some kind of "character" in doing stuff by hand instead of in an automated manner, but with the calendar showing "Oct.7" I didn't have time for keeping all my tags in order.
While trying to configure the fixed IP today, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong when it dawned on me that I had typed in "netmaask" instead of "netmask." I guess haste makes waste. It's these tiny details that must be adhered to intensively in every aspect of technology. And that reminds me of my days of BBEdit when I had a whole page which would not load because I typed a comma instead of period and had to comb through all that code, in a magnified form (so I could actually read the punctuation) before I was able to figure out what the problem was.
U System was actually more of a challenge compared to setting up my webpage. I was banging my head against a brick wall for a while before my wife pointed out that I had gotten disconnected from the VPN. I started up the Cisco and fired up the FileZilla and we were cooking with gas!
I will be interested in knowing how html coding can unlock all of the back-end features of html5. My website seems to have some em or bold tags gone awry, but I feel that had I continued working on it, I would not get it done today.
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