Some days I think I should try to go back to school again for coding. I took a year-long program from the now defunct Chubb Institute back in 2002/3 in "Web Development & Business Programming", got a 4.0 in a course that (judging from the three class groups I was exposed to) 95% of the folks washed out of (when I graduated there were 3 of us, each being the last man standing out of a starting group of 28!), and found that I really enjoyed coding. Unfortunately, I was coming out of that into the post-"dot-com bubble burst" economy, and there were 50 guys with 5+ years of experience lined up in front of me for every job, so not only did I not get a chance to use this newly enhanced skill set (I had managed to teach myself HTML back in 1995), but I couldn't even land an interview. Sound familiar? Yeah, that "KICK ME" sign's been on my back a long time.Anyway, I'm always happy to be able to crank out a web site ... albeit one low on CSS and other newfangled coding, since although I got trained in a lot of that, I was never in a situation where I had a regular need to use it, or the "leisure" to mess around with it on a project. Unfortunately, one rarely is presented with a web site project that "will be needed in three months", it's always "can we get this next week?", so getting something up usually trumps sharpening my chops on the more recent "standards" (although I did successfully negotiate developing a couple of sites based on CSS templates ... it's just never my "first thought" when asking myself "how am I going to get that to look the way it's supposed to?"). I'm sort of hoping that I'm going to find some affordable (free) course that will get me up to speed on HTML5 (I've bought the "For Dummies" book) and CSS3, as some of the new stuff that's available for the web is pretty awesome (I'm presently trying to figure out a project that would make sense to try to use TypeKit, which answers certain long-time prayers of web developers).
One thing that's been missing in the Nature's Little Recyclers project has been a proper web site ... for the past few months the domain Paganics.com has just pointed off to a basic (and none-too-frequently updated) WordPress blog, with the "heavy lifting" being done by a unconnected mix of a couple of Facebook pages, along with Twitter and YouTube accounts. While we'd discussed needing a site, there hadn't been anything concrete coming up, so last weekend I popped open a NotePad window and started flinging some HTML, getting the basic framework of the site over there ===> set up ... and bit & pieces got added this week, with it finally going live on a server with the DNS pointing at the right place this weekend.
Obviously (pardon the "greeking" still holding space on the front page), there's still a lot to be done on this, but everybody's been very pleased with how it turned out (and I was using one of my templates that makes it look/work pretty good on a smart phone), so I figured I'd share it with y'all.