This website is a class project. A few weeks ago I enrolled in a web development course at Geekwise Academy, which runs out of Bitwise's building in downtown Fresno; around here the whole operation just gets called Bitwise, and I do too. Six weeks, two evenings a week from six to nine, two hundred fifty dollars. I come straight from my day job, which makes for long days, and I don't mind.
The course is HTML first, then CSS. A few classes in, that means typing tags into a flat file, saving, and refreshing Chrome to see what changed. I know what the box model is now. I know why my margins were collapsing into each other, and I can float two divs side by side and clear them afterward, which took more save-and-refresh cycles than I want to count. When I'm stuck I look things up on W3Schools or MDN, and when something renders wrong I right-click it and hit Inspect to see what Chrome thinks I wrote.
The final project for the course is a working site, and this is mine. Hand-written HTML, my own CSS, no templates. The blog is here because the site is: pages need content, and writing real posts beats pasting lorem ipsum into divs I intend to keep.
By the end of the six weeks I want the markup to pass the W3C validator, and I want this site living at a domain I paid for instead of a file path on my laptop. There's a second course after this one that goes deeper into CSS3, and I already know where my next two hundred fifty dollars is going.
— Lo