Semper Renovet: I Learned Some HTML Stuff (And Some Latin)

If I ever get fancy enough to have a family crest, or motto, or emblazoned coat of arms, I think my motto would be ‘Semper Renovet’.  I put a great deal of thought into this (like fifty seconds of Googling synonyms for “changing”, since ‘semper mutans’ just wasn’t floating my boat… mutans?  ew.) and settled on “Always Renovating” as a pretty good fit.

It is a good description of me and the way I do things.  As a die-hard perfectionist, I’m always finding new ways to finish stuff I already finished… Constantly renovating is a pretty good way to describe that.

And my blog is no exception.  I get seriously antsy if there isn’t something for me to be doing to improve it, so when I had already customized everything that I knew how to customize, I decided that I needed to know how to do more things.

Enter Codecademy.

So much fun you guys!  You can do online lessons that start with the very baby basics of HTML and CSS and learn how to do really cool stuff!  I’m not ready to build my own website by any means, but I do have a much better understanding of how my blog works and how to customize it.  It’s totally free, so you should def check it out!

One thing that I’ve been wanting to create for a while is a pin-board style project gallery.  Not that I have many of those (projects) to share at the moment, but I will eventually (pinky promise), and I wanted more than just picture after picture in a boring blog-post format.

Ta-da!

It may not look super impressive, but I will share that it took me about two hours to create.  Which, of course, says much more about my coding abilities than the difficulty of creating such a page – however, I’m proud of myself.  At first I tried to code it from scratch, but quickly (after the first hour) realized that I wasn’t quite there yet.

A Google search led me to this wonderful tutorial from Creativity Designs that got me on the right track!  It was really helpful to study the already-written code to see exactly how all the pieces fit together.  Now I think I could write something similar on my own, and I understand how to change things in the code to get different results.  Woo-hoo!  Semper Renovet, y’all!

At the moment I’m out of things to change on my blog (okay, that’s not exactly true – I still want to dive in the CSS side of things, but I’m chicken that I’ll break something really important), so I’m going to start messing around with Bryan’s blog.  Lucky Bryan!

And if you’re at all intimidated to get into the html or css side of blogging: Don’t Be!  If I can do it, you can do it!  (Either that or I’m just a super-smart human being, but I’m betting that it’s the first option.)

Code boldly!