My Secret Skill

I can code and read HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

This blog isn't my first blog or attempt at a blog.

Actually when I first learnt how to code in HTML I was totally in love with the language. I remember staying up late at night building pages. I won't call what I use to do as websites cause they weren't official sites, but I just loved designing and coding pages.

I challenged my skills and ability by trying to copy designs of pages I liked and tried to figure out how the page was put together just by reading the page's source code. I thought I was the shiznit with HTML and considered about a career in web design.

However, like all programming languages it slowly died and programs like Flash and Dreamweaver (where are there today though??) slowly infiltrated the industry and knowing how to coding wasn't necessarily the skill you needed, but how to create pages using these fancy and complicated website builders.

This is where I got lost. There were so many features and options available in these tools which you think would be great as it cuts down the time to build a page, but I just found it more of a hinderance than be beneficial. Other reasons why I was turned off was the costs associated with buying these applications and back in the day YouTube didn't exist (OMG am I that old?) for free online tutorials, so doing a course or buying a book was really expensive.

So understandably over time my love for building websites slowly died. How could my detailed HTML code compete with fancy flash animation?  

Today online blog applications like this one I use, WordPress, Tumblr etc have also made it easy for everyday, non technical people to create and manage a page to host their blog.

I usually stick to the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) option. Did you like that? I snuck in another HTML lingo for you. But occasionally I press the HTML option and make some minor changes I feel that fits my blog needs more.

The other day I spent several hours trying to recall my old HTML skills to do something very simple on here. I won't go into the details but I'm so pleased with myself that I achieved what I wanted to do based on my understanding of website design, utilising the file hosting applications available today and breaking down the problem into small chunks to come up with my solution. 

I'm such an IT nerd at heart. 

If only I could still access the files on my old laptop. I kept on offline version of all the pages I built on there ... would love to reminisce and show print screens of my designs and skills.