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Entry 3 - The Path Reveals Itself

3.1.26

Today was a real breakthrough for me. After weeks of feeling stressed about how I will design this website from scratch, I finally see a clear path forward. Last night, I promised myself to remember to be patient—that it’s okay if I don’t have all of the answers right now. Well, today, some of the answers have risen to the surface.

In today’s lesson, I learned about boilerplates—the foundation for a website!

In this lesson, I was introduced to basic boilerplate setup, and it’s finally starting to click for me how websites are woven together so beautifully. I learned that the boilerplate is basically broken down into three sections. 1) The declaration (example: <!DOCTYPE html>), which states the HTML format and language. 2) Head <head> where things like metadata and link elements live. 3) Body <body> which holds all of the text portions of the website. Like <h1> and <p>.

The part that really helped me understand was the section on link elements. How, in the <head>, you can use link elements to tell the computer to locate certain files stored in separate folders. The lesson example used a stylesheet stored in a CSS file. Until today, it has been really hard for me to imagine how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript came together. And in that one simple lesson on boilerplates, it all finally started to make sense.

With that, I set up a roadmap for my website’s development over the next few months. It goes like this: 1) Focus on school. Use the website as a living notebook to record/share my notes, thoughts, and observations. In the meantime, write everything using Markdown. 2) When I’m ready, I will rewrite my homepage using a custom HTML boilerplate (which I am now very excited to make!) with links to external CSS and JavaScript files. 3) SEO/polishing touches 4) Start building actual projects and use this website as a place to share them :)

So far, the most fun part has been learning something in class and then immediately trying it out on this website. It’s like: “Here’s a toy. Here’s how it works. Now you play with it.” I’ve been having a blast.

Accomplishments:

Learned about boilerplates
Wrote out my plan to develop this website
Set up my favicon! (The image in your web browser tab should be a teeny-tiny-little radio tower. Pictured below)
Verified my site with Google Search Console

Challenges

The only challenge today was understanding link elements. But once I did, it was smooth sailing.

Final Thoughts

Now that I have a clear path forward, a rock-solid plan, and a better understanding of website construction, I am really looking forward to getting my feet wet in Responsive Web Design. I hope to look back on these transmission log entries one day, smile, and revel in how far I have come.

My favicon image (up close)

End of entry — Walks Tall

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