Today:

Last day of March Break; All Ontario school boards required to end mandatory masking of students, staff tomorrow; The Batman dominates the North American box office; Labour disagreements lead to the shutdown of Canadian Pacific Railway operations.

2022.03.20 | The Satisfying Results of Self-Study

Well, here it is! What you are seeing now is the result of the period of self-study I referenced in my posting of February 28th. The most obvious change is the visual payoff of the deep-dive I completed into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I'm very proud of what I've managed to create in less than a month, especially given that I had zero experience in CSS, and also had more work to do in studying the fundamentals of HTML before I could begin to understand the complementary role played by style sheets.

The current iteration of adammcburney.com, which I am calling version 2.0, takes inspiration from the structure of my previous personal webpages, Snap's Domain, as well as the colour scheme of the short-lived first edition of adammcburney.com.

Several resources were invaluable in making this new version of the site possible. First, the HTML and CSS courses of study offered by SoloLearn through their iOS app were incredible introductions to the basics of CSS structure and implementation. I sprang for the yearly subscription when I briefly explored programming in Python, and I recommend this option for anyone who can afford it.

I also invested in a used copy of Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 for Dummies, by Ed Tittel and Chris Minnick. Although the text is almost a decade old, it was incredibly helpful in understanding the relationships between HTML and CSS, as well as the deprecation of certain elements in HTML4, especially frames. I learned so much as a teenager from my well-worn volumes of DOS for Dummies and Windows 3.1 for Dummies, so it felt a bit like coming home to employ a For Dummies book in this new learning adventure.

Finally, the online CSS resources available at W3Schools served as an indispensable glossary when I struggled to recall what attribute would achieve my intended effect. As well, the YouTube video "Intro to CSS Grid - Create a Basic Layout" by dcode provided me an exceptionally clear understanding of the basics of CSS Grid layout. I encourage you to subscribe to his channel.

I intend for the development of this site to be an ongoing project. I hope to add more content in the coming days, including an interactive photo gallery and pages highlighting some of my interests and hobbies. Structurally, my next steps include increasing the responsiveness of the site to a variety of monitor resolutions, and also investigating ways of making the site more visually appealing and navigable on mobile platforms.

For now, though, it feels pretty damn good to have accomplished something like this: to have finally taken off the training wheels of WYSIWYG HTML editors and created something entirely from scratch.