JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

I always feel a mixture of excitement and dread when I start a new technical book. I’m about to dive into the intimidatingly thick JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan. Javascript guru Douglas Crockford mentioned in his wonderful series of lectures that it was the best (or did he say “least bad”?) javascript book there is. Truthfully, I have always hated javascript for a number of reasons, but he convinced me that it isn’t that bad. And ok, a little part of me is excited to use classes and learn about prototypal inheritance, which I think just might be the future. Oh yeah, and AJAX. I gotta learn AJAX.

The event that allowed me to turn back to study after lots of time developing websites is the near completion of two big projects. They aren’t perfect, but I’m waiting for some things to fall in place (hosting, etc.) before I can finish them up. I’m actually thankful for the delay, I was feeling a little burnt out.

Time to hit the books!

Blogging in the heat of the moment

This was originally a reply to liverbones’ comment of my last post, but it became long so I gave it a home of its own.

Just about every day I run across some design or technical problem that I can only solve through blogs or message boards. Its an amazing resource, and I couldn’t get by without it. However, I find that the solutions are often lacking.

The problem is that the tech guru who is answering the question usually figured out the thing in question long ago, and can’t remember quite what their personal “Ah HAH!” moment was. So they leave the little stuff out. For instance, if you’re not used to linux command line stuff, and you install something that you have to initialize through the command line, you cannot just type in shell$ foo and expect it to work. Most likely, the command foo is not in your path. So you actually have to go to the file where the program is, then type in shell$ ./foo. The “.” tells your computer that the command can be found in this directory. But ask a linux guru how to initialize a program, and she will tell you “Just type in foo” at the command line. Its not that they don’t know how to do it right, its that they know it so well that they forgot to tell you. This why the best answers come from bloggers who are right in the heat of the moment, still trying to figure it out when they post.

For instance, I posted my GoDaddy entry just yesterday. But I had been working on getting wordpress set up on GoDaddy for hours. Actually, to be honest, days. This blog helped, as did the comments on this post, but it made everything seem so easy. Fact is, when I first uploaded the site, nothing worked at all.

I struggled with the wp-config file forever. Then I enabled pretty urls, which broke everything, and spent several hours downloading and uploading the .htaccess file trying to modify just the right thing. It was only after I gave up (because of a blog post that mentioned if you just wait, everything will work), waited two days, and tried again that it worked. Instantly. For no reason at all.

So my point is, because I treasure the thoughtful, generous people who document their sometimes painful journey through the trials of learning how to do stuff with computers, I am going to start blogging while I’m still trying to figure shit out.

MilhollandCycles.com

This is a progress report on MilhollandCycles.com, website I am building for my brother Greg, who builds bicycles in our house in Portland. His bikes are great. He built me the coolest fillet braised mountain bike that languishes in the basement while I try to save enough cash to get paint and parts on it. I think about it every day, and when the sun is out and I’m not at work it kills me that I am not mountain biking every second.

So I built Greg a theme for wordpress. It was pretty straight forward. I love wordpress. The code is elegant and extensible, and you can do whatever the hell you want to with it. I built Greg’s theme on top of the default theme that comes with the wordpress download. switch around a few php include tags and give it a new style.css document and you’re in business. I host my sites in the webserver document folder on my laptop because I can’t get virtual domains to work, but that’s another post. Anyhow, its a great testing platform because I can view the sites as they are served from the apache server on my laptop. Most of the time its just like they are live on the ‘net. Not always though. Some of the plugins (lightbox in particular) didn’t work quite right.

Thankfully when I uploaded the site to godaddy (I know what you are thinking, don’t judge me!), everything miraculously worked. Plugins, pages, everything. Except pretty URLs, that broke everything. But it wasn’t THAT hard to fix, you just have to erase all of the stuff that wordpress adds to the .htaccess file and replace it with a clean one.

The thing that vexes me is no shell access. I didn’t even think about this when choosing hosting services, but godaddy does not allow shell access. That means that you have to manipulate SQL tables with phpMyAdmin. I do not like this program. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the hands-approach. I just don’t trust the GUI to be messing with my SQL. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. WordPress has done a fine job all on its own. But I am worried. Enough so that I won’t host another site on godaddy again. Sorry.

What this is all about

This is my first attempt at a blog. I plan on being faithful to it.

The point of this blog is to write about my journey from aspiring web designer to the real thing. By “real thing” I mean making my living designing and developing websites. I’ve been working on this goal for, oh, prolly six months now. Seems longer. That actually makes me feel better about myself, calculating that it has only been six months. I spend a lot of time feeling hopelessly behind. Everything I learn makes me realize how much more I have to learn.

Here is where I’m at after six months:

• I develop on my white 13″ 2.16ghz MacBook with 4GB of RAM. I do my coding in TextMate, my graphics in Inkscape and Gimp, and my testing in Firefox first, then in IE6 and IE7 using a combination of ies4mac and a desktop running windows XP that my friend Lee gave me, god bless him. Fetch is my FTP program. I have strong opinions about all the aforementioned software and hardware so I’ll undoubtedly be posting about them in the future.
• Whenever possible, I use standards compliant code. If its not possible I will look for a way around non-compliant code for days and hours before I give up, and even then it haunts my dreams. I kind of love standards. My girlfriend would say its because I’m a virgo.
• I’m a whiz at html and css up their current versions. I’m looking into CSS3 right now and I’m psyched about it like only someone who spends all their free time thinking about backgrounds and borders can be.
• A couple years ago I learned a little php and MySQL, which has come in handy with things like creating wordpress themes. I would describe my relationship with php and MySQL as a “working knowledge”.
• I also have a “working knowledge” of javascript, but perhaps not quite as working as php. I can manipulate the DOM to create simple things like image rollovers. Honestly, javascript intimidates the hell out of me. Its my next big mountain to climb after I complete all the websites I’m working on right now and go back into sweet sweet study mode.
• I just started using version control with Bazaar, which I highly recommend.
• I don’t know jack about Flash, and honestly, it doesn’t do much for me. I read to many blog posts about accessibility to be excited about it. I’ll look in to flash after I learn Javascript and mod_python.
• Oh yeah, mod_python. Don’t know much about it honestly. But from what I hear, its a server-side scripting language like php, but without all the putting code into html documents. That’s cool, cause as much as I like php, complex apps can become a huge mess. And apparently it plays well with MySQL, allowing you to make complex database queries easily. I am totally in to that, but mod_python will have to wait until I learn javascript. Baby steps.

There is probably more. But that is what a blog is for right? Right.