Dixon's Forum

A slow week here at Dixon’s Forum.    The domain is apparently wwwed, hopefully properly, but I don’t know enough to know for sure.    My “Web Coding & Development all-in-one” for dummies (7 Books in one!) finally came; maybe that will teach me how to tell.    It looks like a textbook, so I decided to use it that way.

The top two most useful classes I ever took were Speed Reading and How to Study.    They teach how to learn.    So, the first thing I read was the Table of Contents, trying to spot topics of extra interest or puzzlement to watch for in the chapters.

It’s like seventeen pages of Book and Chapter titles, with Chapter Headings and sub-Headings like “Positioning Elements” and “Anchors aweigh:    internal links”, in a neat and orderly outline.    The Index is also outlined neat and orderly, three levels of sub-Topics, forty-one pages.

That word “element” jumped right out at me; I had thought WordPress Elementor invented those.    As other familiar terms from Elementor — Flexbox, Grid Container, CSS — popped up, it dawned on me with growing horror that the online How to Make a Website step-by-step guide was more WordPress fishhook than website learnbook.

The Table of Contents nor the Index of the website book for dummies make no mention of Content Management Systems, of which WordPress is by far the most popular, nor Site Builders, in which Elementor also enjoys a leadership position, and I began to believe that I could do dixonsforum.com without them.    At least then I wouldn’t have Elementor telling me I can’t make a JavaScript Back Button out of an Image Carousel.        Click here for the whole story; a Back Button to return.

But, neither Table of Contents nor Index mentions Image Carousel.    Neither also do they mention sitemaps, nor XML, other important components of a world-class website, and I concluded they are needed after all.    They’re basically user interfaces that take care of the thousands of lines of code needed to make a website conforming to designers’ wishes through a simpler set of commands, and cataloguing all the pages, posts, and comments of a well-run blog.    I can’t do all that alone.

The for-dummies Contents and Index entries reveal JavaScript is more than a just few control strings.    It’s an entire high-level language, with functions and variables, arrays and loops, expressions and decisions, everything!    These things I am familiar with, but have no idea what a “method” is, nor a “combinator” nor “selector”, “anonymous functions”, “scopes”,  “pseudo elements” — all foreign to the languages I’ve known.    I’ll watch for them in the chapters.

There’s Hyper Text Markup Language to learn, and Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, MySQL, XAMPP, JSON  . . .    all players in the concerts that websites are, nothing like pasting things onto a Publisher Pamphlet.    I am eager to plunge in and discover better, freer ways, because although Dixon’s Forum is indeed a creative works showcase, dixonsforum.com is in itself also an artpiece, welcoming to any way to make it better.    It will be fun to explore the new things I can do.

The fourth segment of “That’s my Way” tells how I earned the Candidate’s trust.    Click here to see it.    .

Click here       for its home page. 

Next Week:    “Unentitled” Installment Four.