Back in 2010, I found myself living (now I’ve come to learn) a luxurious life. By ‘luxurious’ I mean, I had a surplus amount of the most treasured commodity in the world on my hands. Time. Being the inquisitive person that I am, I started to feel uneasy and slightly agitated in my life. I was doing nothing. Therefore, had to Something! What? In today’s world, having an internet connection doing anything is easy. The easiest thing to do is LEARN. Therefore I set out on my new venture of learning HTML, some coding language, and I thought why not start a blog? So, I started out where everyone does, by asking Google how to do stuff.

Some background: In 2008 a friend had built a very simple personal landing page where he had his resume written out. I asked him how? I knew that HTML was a bit more difficult than writing a Word document, but he told me otherwise. The resume that he had as a Word Document, saved it as HTML and voila! He told me to rename that as ‘index.html’ and host it. It immediately clicked. He was during the end of his undergraduate course, seeking employment, and this definitely helps him stand out from the rest. It’s simple. In today’s world, anyone looking to employ another person will most definitely at least do a Google search. This was the easiest way to be found. Also, you have (almost) complete control over what’s shown. This was a time when Hi5 was the largest online social network and ‘thefacebook.com’ just lost the ‘the’ in its name. I actually tried it. Googled my friend’s name, and his webpage came up first in the results. 

Today, it’s less necessary to actually do this, because you can have a Wix page that you can set up however you want, also LinkedIn can handle your employment/professional side, and you can host your thoughts on Tumblr, Medium, or WordPress, or if you’re a fan of the 140 verse, twitter/X can handle that. Those are the first things that will show up on a query for your name on any search provider. Your Facebook profile comes up as well if you set up your privacy settings to do so.

However, even today I thought, having a personal landing page would probably set me out from the majority of people. That was only one of the reasons I set out to learn HTML. The main reason would be to understand how the web works. How websites are delivered, the role that browsers play and why is that relevant, as well as if it is difficult to be in any online business.

That’s the what and the why.

As for the ‘how’ I spent about 2 to 4 months learning various things. I designed a simple website. The problem with designing something is deciding on what you want to show on it. I knew I wanted to host my resume so that potential employers can easily guide themselves to view my previous experiences. Also, I knew that someday I would have a blog, because there are a lot of things that bother me, that just makes me feel better if they’re expressed somewhere, and not forgotten. In addition to that, I had no clue.

How about if I include a picture? Ok, which picture? Hmm… a really good one! Where should I find a good picture? I had read a blog post (can’t find the exact one now) that Google wanted to do something with pictures on its homepage like Bing, but it badly implemented the idea, and that there were some bad choices in pictures nyti.ms/X2AgBP. So I knew where I could find good pictures. Bing.com. But what would be really cool is if the pictures were constantly changing, so that people visiting my website could be graced with a beautiful picture every time. I wondered if that would be possible? Found out that it would be possible; everything is possible on the internets. The real question if it was easy and simple enough so that a beginner like me could do?

I set out to find out how to do that. I learned that a lot of the websites that we take for granted that do amazing things work on PHP (i.e. Facebook.com). That was a tough time. Learning PHP. I had no clue what I was doing, but I felt that I was getting closer. After about a week of trial and error, I found out that someone had built an rss feed of all bing.com homepage images. Then I wrote the script to use the links of those pictures that that rss feed has, to be embedded on my website. That was a real victory for me. That was like the icing on the cake, I felt that with the little amount of effort that went in (2-4 months is very little time to go from zero knowledge to ‘designing’ and hosting a website) that my personal website was done.

This was all made possible by the free resources that you can easily find online. Tutorials on blogs of web designers, lessons on w3schools.com, and stuff that can be easily found on the first or second page of Google search results. I know I’m far from ever making a more complicated, database containing, website, but at least I can understand it.

I thought I’d put the same effort into learning a little code. JavaScript is widely used on the internet, so I knew I had to know some coding language as well. Having no knowledge of how coding works, JavaScript seemed all over the place. So I started to read about C#. Its structure looked easier to understand. The syntax as well. From a beginners point of view, yes C# does look understandable. Also, Microsoft with its VisualStudio helps a lot. So began to learn some C#.

All of this made me feel good about myself and started to feel useful for a change. Doing nothing and watching movies, reading books, listening to music all day does get you down. So this was something different, knowledge that could be easily applied.

As time went on, I started to work on a new project for a TV show, and time was becoming scarce. I had a lot of ambition about this blog and found out that writing all my ideas would require a lot of energy and time which at the end of the day I did not have.

So, I believe that although nothing substantial happened during that part of my life, I learned something new and applied it.

Update (2014): I originally had my blog hosted on Opera‘s social (now forgotten) corner MyOpera.com. They closed it to become a more focused company, and I had to find an alternative. I picked the most famous, the most widely used: WordPress. Installing it and migrating to it was easier than making pancakes. This blog helped me get a job as a copywriter with a really good communications agency. Being around great designers pushed me to elevate the importance of good design, in… everything. Therefore, me not being a ‘designer’ in any capacity, had to find a solution to my ‘website’ problem. The easiest route is a WordPress theme. That’s the wonderful thing about WordPress. The open source aspect of it gives you access to multitudes of resources that other people create. People that receive for free are more inclined to reciprocate the deed. The future of technology is in open source, but that’s a whole other blog post. Thus, I sought to find the most beautiful theme for my site, and after a couple of months, I found it at this Swedish graphic designer’s site. It has the right amount of just about everything I want.

So, enjoy my ramblings …