It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Setting up this blog naturally made me want to customize it, but Word Press is virtually 100% CSS and PHP, two languages I’ve unfortunately never taken the time to learn. Now, PHP has been on my “to-do” list for nearly ten years along with MySQL. It’s one of the programming tools I use on websites quite a bit, but usually in a pre-packaged context. Something had to give.

What this has wound up doing is making me think back to the time over twelve years ago when I first taught myself how to code websites in HTML. I never used a page editor (till after the fact, and even then it was only to see how the other half lived), just started with a short HTML section in a book that came with my first modem (28.8kbps! Yeah! The world was my oyster!) and supplemented the rest with a really nifty section on America Online called the “Web Diner” which had free, step by step lessons for some more advanced HTML that my book just didn’t cover. Everything else was learned simply by viewing the sources of sites I liked.

Consequently, I became really proficient with HTML. I could get tables to do exactly what I wanted them to, I could get some really nifty frames going (although I typically avoided them), and I was a master at rudimentary duct tape methods to have codes do things other than what they were supposed to do.

But for some reason or other I stopped about two years in. Oh, I kept designing sites and writing pages in HTML, but while the world of web design exploded into new things– PHP, XHTML, CSS, MySQL, and more– I stayed in my corning playing with what I’d already learned and pretty much ignored modern advancements.

So, this blog and my desire to ultimately customize it exactly how I want gave me the push I needed to actually dive into at least one of those languages and actually learn some new tricks. I ultimately settled on CSS, since it seems to be the most versatile tool to know and allows you to do some really cool things (and will ultimately be the way this blog gets customized the way I want it). I’ve encountered it in the past, known some people who’ve really taken to it (and they can do amazing stuff), but never actually learned it myself.

I’ve been reading a book explaining CSS this week, though, and I’ve typed up some dummy style sheets just to get the hang of things and see what I can cobble together. And let me tell you, it’s been FUN!

This page still looks the same because I want everything to go smoothly when the customization actually happens, but let me tell you, learning all these new tricks and recognizing the new avenues this language opens up takes me back to those early days in the Web Diner and I feel the same kind of excitement. I’d forgotten how much fun true Web Designing is. Can’t believe I let myself coast this long.

Once I finish CSS, PHP, XHTML, and MySQL are next. No more complacency.