Coder Manual Week 1

So I completed Week 1 of the Coder Manual Course. 

In Part 1, we covered setting up the different systems we needed. The first was Cloud 9 (C9.com), an online IDE where we can run Ruby (among many other languages actually). Second, he had us download Sublime Text ( SublimeText.com) which is basically a programmer-focused text editor. It'll format what you type depending on the language to make it easier to read and follow. Alternatively, he said you could use JSFiddle (JSFiddle.net), or CodePen (CodePen.io).

In Part II, he took us through how cloud 9 could be used to set up a blog. The main takeaway from this part was that there is lots of code available online that we can borrow to make ours look nice. The tutor took us to a website where we copied a bit of publicly available code into one of the files of our blog. With that in there, we were able to call upon different formats and styles that the maker of the code had already made, saving us the trouble of having to design it all ourselves. So for instance, we made 3 buttons (new post, edit post, delete post) and now we were able to enter a few lines of code that enabled those three buttons take on different appearances such as a textured green, yellow, or red. We also learned how to add entries to our blog, delete entries, and list the entries in a nice looking table complete with the date they were posted. Yes this is all stuff you can do MUCH quicker with a website like Blogger.com, but this is how you learn and what if you wanted to make a blog that can do things Blogger can't? Also, if you're probably wondering why I'm using blogger if I just learned how to make my own blog. Simple: web hosting. Blogger will host my blog, whereas I'm on my own or I'll have to pay to have my custom one properly hosted. Also, I'm still a n00b at this.

In Part III, we learned about HTML and websites. Using the Sublime Text editor, the tutor walked us through the different ways of displaying some of the most basic content on a website. We covered:

• formatting text as:
  • paragraphs
  • headers,
  • unordered lists,
  • ordered lists,
  • nested lists,
• inserting images,
• putting text in tables,
• creating forms with:
• Text Fields,
• Password Fields,
• Checkboxes,
• Radio Buttons,
• Dropdown Selectors, and
• Text Areas

Among a few other things. Lastly, he showed us how to bring a fancy, freely available existing template, into Cloud9 so we can edit it for ourselves. So far, he hasn't really taught us anything that you can't do much quicker using existing software, if your goal is to just make a blog or webpage. However, I'm quite pleased with what I'm learning as I feel it will help me understand much better how websites work, and programming in general. Also, this blog entry was typed almost entirely in the HTML tab of Bloggers New Post form. I formatted the tables and hyperlinks myself using code as opposed to using Blogger's autoformats. :P