Dixon's Forum

It’s been another slow week here at Dixon’s Forum.    Haven’t done much work on the website, just read Book One:    Getting Ready to Code for the Web from “Web Coding & Development all-in-one for dummies (7 Books in one!)”.

It’s basically an overview of how the web works, what kind of files do which task, followed by instructions on setting up a web development home, which I now have already with WordPress and Elementor, and a guide to selecting a web hosting service, which I have with Hostinger.    The Dummies development home has you develop and test your website before going public, like I wanted.    WordPress puts a canned example site, in your name, before you even get started.    Click here        to see it, a “←back” button there to return.    If you click a “Home” button there, you won’t go back to this home page here, no.    You’ll end up at Dixon’s Forum’s first ever Home Page, for a fuller story.    Click here      to see that.

The only way to for sure get back to this home page here is to keep hitting the “Back” buttons everywhere, because, for each Weekly Activity blog post, there’s also an introductory Home Page like this one, which for one week enjoys the position of Static Home Page to introduce the current week’s activity.    Then, the home pages become Blog Posts disguised as Static Home Pages, linked up to the weekly activities like real introductory static home pages, so the “Home” buttons may not all link to the true, current, one-and-only Static Home Page, soon slated to also become a disguised Blog Post.

Going public right away with a canned example site is all well and good for websight designers familiar with WordPress; they can flip features in and out and have the site they envision lickety-split, just like their “How to Make a Website — A free, step-by-step guide for making a website in an hour or less” says, no coding needed.    But if you never laid eyes on coding or WordPress before, don’t understand its most basic buzzwords, can’t even enter text in their editor yet, it’s horrifying!    But I got over it.

I had originally pictured a little time setting up the website, and then a couple of hours each week adding the content for the Weekly Activities, but it’s actually been months of difficult, time-consuming hard labor, learning and applying the features of WordPress and Elementor, site security, privacy policy, one unforeseen thing after another.    It took over a week to figure out how to put non-breaking spaces, like between ellipsis dots, or double-spacing after a sentence (which HTML strips out all but one regular space, boo ick).    The forums could not tell me how to put them.

Fortunately, I ran across “ALT Codes”, a way to enter special characters like no-break space through the keyboard.    The sequence for a single no-break space is:

• press and hold the left-hand “alt” key
• press and release numeric keypad “0”
• press and release numeric keypad “1”
• press and release numeric keypad “6”
• press and release numeric keypad “0”
• release left-hand “alt” key

, and there is your no-break space!    So I told it to the forums, and every double space you see here is comprised of keystrokes:    <spacebar><alt0160><alt0160><spacebar>.

I learned later Elementor has a menu-driven special characters insertion tool,     Plus, Chapter 1:   Structuring the Page with HTML of the For Dummies web development book has an Inserting Special Characters section.    But the ALT Codes are probably quicker.

So even preparing the weekly content is more involved than I imagined, which was paste in chunks of stuff already written.    I have to add the no-break spaces and other special characters, and place paragraphs into columns and center the verses, format the typography, update the links, make sure like a dozen of them all point to the right places, all by hand, every week.    Still. after all that unanticipated effort, and anticipating more to come, it was good to take a week off and do just the bare minimum for a change.

I go to all this trouble because,  while Dixon’s Forum is indeed a creative works showcase, dixonsforum.com is also itself an artpiece.    Hyper Text Markup Language, and Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, MySQL, XAMPP, JSON, all hold new discoveries for me, which I passionally await, in the art of the Web.

The fourth installment of “Unentitled” introduces you to my comic strip, though it’s not the introductory piece of the series.    I still have to figure out how to get the panels to stick together; they need to be separated to stack nice on mobile screens.    Click here to see it.    .

Click here       for its home page. 

Next Week:    “That’s my Way” Segment Five.    It tells how I tried to deepen, solidify, the candidate’s quickly-earned trust.