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Recommendation A person who can't code, at all, trying to edit their own website's html - is this a terrible idea?

Winot said:
Lots of people seem to be using Linktree for that.

linktr.ee

Linktree: Link everything you are

Linktree makes room for all of you. Get everything you create, curate and share, wherever it’s scattered online, and put it back together again in one place – your Linktree – where it can be discovered with ease.
linktr.ee linktr.ee
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These are useful, but I still want to put up some contact info and a couple examples of my work, so just need something pretty basic, but everything template driven is just overload.
 
MickiQ said:
That sounds way too sensible, you will never get a job in IT with an attitude like that.
Click to expand...
I've got a spreadsheet that I did years ago for my accounts with a summary page that adds up and across as a final check - I always had to fiddle the final figures by adding in amounts to make it balance. Last year I realized if I corrected the summary page month by month it was suddenly really easy to find out where my mistake was :)
 
Bimble what you are describing is the way most people start to learn and you can quickly pick up the basics and develop your skills.

I used to find it useful to have the page open in textpad (free) and also open in a browser so I could hit refresh and immediately see if the last changes I had made had had the effect I wanted them to.
 
My first real try at programming was after I and a friend got back pissed from a bar one night. We were playing The Hobbit on a ZX Spectrum and discovered that you could change the program, so we changed a bit and went back and played it again to see the effect. Eventually stayed up through the night doing it. I loved it, great way to learn (Basic) programming, I recommend this exact method.
 
editor said:
I'm glad I learnt because this website would never come about. And I got some interesting work out of being a web designer for a little while.
I use WordPress now because it's so much easier.
Click to expand...

I suppose we learn things if we have a problem to solve. Given I didn’t have a web site there was no reason for me to learn the nuts and bolts of it. Would be a useful skill to have though.
 
I've started on the website reconstruction, i'm using bluegriffon, find it's easier to be able to alternate between wysiwyg and editing the code.

And getting the hang of css which means a lot of old crap can be stripped out of the HTML and if the committee decide to change house colours yet again, it can be done once.

Anyone got ideas on how to create one menu / navigation sidebar and use that across the whole site without having to copy it in to each page (which isn't that big a deal now but will be annoying if it ever needs to change) - in the old site, that's handled with it being a separate frame / page, but that's kinda passe.

I've found several conflicting suggestions for how to do it, each seems to be more complicated than the last...
 
The easiest way to have a menu on every page, but only have one file to update is to use a bit of 'include' code on each page. Which version of an include will depend on your server settings, but the most common options would probably be PHP or SSI (server side includes). Most web servers will have PHP installed and if your server runs Apache then it will be able to do SSI (although you might need to change the server settings to turn SSI on for .html files).

The code you'd add for SSI would be something like this:

<!--#include file="./menu.html" -->

Adding this to your .htaccess file would turn SSI on for .html files:

Options +Includes AddType text/html .html AddHandler server-parsed .html AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .html

For PHP it would be something very similar:

<?php include "./menu.php" ?>

For PHP to work you'd probably need to have your files ending .php instead of .html

And there are about another ten ways to achieve the same result.

You won't be able to test this working on your local PC unless you're running a web server.
 
update of extreme joy - with help (a LOT) from my very patient and generous friend (same one who wrote the website in first place) I am completely able to do this now, all by myself.
He did a load of stuff that made it really simple for me to add and change my own pics & text, using github. He made it so i don't even have to write <div> and things like that, just minimal colons. But even if this is the coding equivalent of thinking i'm cooking when i'm just sticking the pre-chopped veg in the stir fry, it still feels pretty great.
eta haven't got to the bit where it gets pushed (pushed?) to my actual website yet, working on a 'staging website' on github , like a prototype so i can just add and revert :cool: pics of my cat for practice & nothing can get permanently broken.
 
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fecking hell its boring though, i thought Coding sounded really cool and clever but its apparently mostly just staring at a screen for ages looking to see if the cause of everything being broken is that you put a colon one space too far to the right? Crap.
 
bimble said:
fecking hell its boring though, i thought Coding sounded really cool and clever but its apparently mostly just staring at a screen for ages looking to see if the cause of everything being broken is that you put a colon one space too far to the right? Crap.
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There should be automatic code checking software about, though I'm far too amateur to say for sure. Sort of like spell checking, catches broken syntax. Someone who knows what they're on about might happen past with a recommendation.
 
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bimble said:
fecking hell its boring though, i thought Coding sounded really cool and clever but its apparently mostly just staring at a screen for ages looking to see if the cause of everything being broken is that you put a colon one space too far to the right? Crap.
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Welcome to the exciting world if IT, it's usually missing quotes that does for me.
 
Have read most of this thread. But still gonna ask anyway as.

I want to build a basic site. Hosting some audio, links to music, contact info, social media, i.e. displays latest tweets (not that I use twitter much ATM.) That kinda thing.

Would prefer not to use SquareSpace or Wicks as
1. Those sort of drag and drop UIs are mostly inaccessible to design with using screenreaders IME.
2. I don't want to pay monthly hosting fees, if possible.
3. I do have some basic but probably out of date coding skills. I had a really shit site using PHP includes and CSS years ago. Happy to try learning a bit of code again but not wanting to build a whole mysql driven thing myself.
4. It's gonna be Wordpress yeah?

Probably questions on themes to follow if so
 
I tried following a build your own PHP / mysql driven site book a few years ago. Got it working so far but then, yeah the missing "."!=$" something broke it and it done my head in trying to find where so abandoned it. The book was pretty good though TBF.
 
how the hell do i type the straight quote marks instead of the curly ones ?

Please tell me there's a simple answer to this.
google not helping,
i am on a mac keyboard a few years old.
 
Well whatever platform you're using, there should be an easy tweak to the base code to stop it converting " to “ or ”

Does it let you write HTML directly? You could always try writing &quot; which is the code entity for straight quotes (or &#34; or &#x22; - the decimal or hex equivalents).
 
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