Category Archives: Coding

HTML Notes

My Code Camp Learning Method

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I have always found it much easier to write almost everything down when learning in an educational environment. I seem to find the act of writing it down helps it sink into my head. I did lots of this at both college and university and I think it was time well spent.

Some people record lectures with their smartphone or a dicta-phone, I used to sit there with a pen and notebook. In the digital age and certainly when the laptop is my only source of education, this time, and writing in a notebook is not always practical.

Internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox etc all have ‘tabbed browsing’ which makes it very easy for me to have a Google document open on one and my code camp on another. This is my Code Camp learning method.

My method

All I do is copy and paste the whole question into the Google document – formatting holds very well and document tabs are automatically created. Once I have completed the question I then copy and paste my code into the Google document just below its relevant question. I notice that the formatting is again kept the same – very useful.

The beauty of all of this is that when I find myself having to create a similar piece of code whether that is CSS or HTML, I can just look back over the document and find it. Further to this there are two other tools I use; a reference book and YouTube.

Helpful resources

The reference book, written by John Duckett ‘HTML and CSS Design and Build Websites‘ I find really useful as it lays out on a page, the result of code written and explains about the different ways to approach your CSS when planning your work. The YouTube channel I have most useful is created by Landon Schlangen who has a very good pace method that works well for me. I have embedded his video below for the landing page project which is where I am now in my journey on FreeCodeCamp.

Learning HTML

Solving technical problems is a skill that has served me well for over 20 years. Learning HTML is a topic that has bounced around in my head many times. I have been trying to find my niche since April of this year and figured that SEO was what I wanted along with content writing. I have always been good with writing articles but many have been short, or, thin content as can be seen on my old Yellowboat Computers blog, not so good for search engine optimisation unless you have very unique content.

A little history of my web development journey

This website of course is based on WordPress. Here is a little history. I began developing my own website around 2004 using NVU, a very small program for both Windows and Linux. Basic as it was, it was functional,  however, you are required to save your files in the correct structure meaning that one needs a basic knowledge of html file heirarchy – it didn’t do it for you . Kompozer which is very similar to NVU , came out later in 2005 and at the time I was using it, it seemed a better program. I notice while writing this blog that Kompozer is still being downloaded – nice!

Serif WebPlus – my gamechanger

It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon Serif WebPlus which was at the time a welcome upgrade for me and offered far more capability through additional features. It would be correct to say that all the features were already available in straight HTML code, but as I did not know HTML I had to rely on a package such as Serif to provide such features.

I remember getting a new version of Serif and the reason I upgraded was because it had the feature of making websites responsive. This means that no matter what device you were using to view a responsive website – it would work properly for the person using it. I was unaware that, in basic terms, simply making a website responsive, was possible from the use of a single line of code:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>

More information on HTML Responsive Web Design.

The next development I found was WordPress – I took a beginner course with WPBeginner and begun the WordPress adventure that I have used until now. So, back to the present. I have completed two SEO courses, one on Udemy SEO Training Masterclass 2024 by Alex Genadinik, I found this course to be incredibly comprehensive, even though I have had previous SEO experience it is good to keep yourself up-to-date. The second SEO course I completed was provided free of charge by Hubspot. I highly recommend either.

So, there it is. I still have some WordPress updates to learn but for now I am using Free Code Camp for my initial front end development learning. If you want to learn HTML then I highly recommend Free Code Camp – give it a try.