Sunday, October 7, 2007

HTML and Exploding Braincells

Alright, now she's done it. She's gone completely stark raving mad!!!! She's even talking about herself in the 3rd person. It must be bad! Aaaarrrrrhhhhhhh......

Perhaps I should begin by making a teeny, tiny confession. I HATE COMPUTERS!!!! Always have and maybe always will. Why? They make me feel like an incompetent idiot. I've always thought they were stupid - but apparently computers can't actually BE stupid, only their operators can!

In fact, I hate computers so much that I was VERY proud of myself when I managed to go all the way through high school without having to do a single computing lesson. Okay, it did have a little to do with switching states and schools and all sorts of reasons. But the end result was that I didn't have to suffer through computer classes at school. I'm old enough that computers in primary schools were a rare commodity but young enough that pretty much all of my peers did at least 6-12 months of computing classes.

Okay, there was 1 lesson at school where I did have to use the dreaded machines. Have you ever noticed how common it is for mathematics teachers to also teach computing? *sigh* If there is one thing I hated MORE than computing - it was maths. I didn't have a lot of hope of avoiding that through high school though! In fact, I seem to remember spending too many lunch-times doing maths as well. *SIGH*. So, my year 9 maths teacher thought he'd be really tricky and teach us maths on the computers!!!! Yeah, that made maths so much more appealling - NOT! Thankfully it lasted the whole of 1 lesson. Phew!

Yes, I know. Computers do have their usefulness. Yes, I'm using one right now. Yes, I wouldn't have made so many wonderful online friends if it weren't for computers. You would have to say my computer and I have settled into a somewhat comfortable love-hate truce. I love to use it but hate it when I can't figure HOW. LOL.

When DH and I bought our first computer, the salesperson assured us that they are completely "idiot proof" and that we couldn't really do anything to our computer to *wreck* it. He was WRONG!!!! Okay, maybe you can reformat it or whatever it is they do but you can certainly lose a lot of STUFF by pushing the wrong buttons. Yeah, I need to do more backing up. Not that he was the *best* of people to give advice about computers - when ours needed fixing it turned out I had more idea of the problem than he did (even though it took him 2 weeks before he'd agree with me). There was a scratch on our disk - see, not everything about computers is *technical*.

Now, where was I heading with this post? That's right. HTML. It does stand for something but I've already forgotten what. LOL. Not that it really matters. All I know is it's some kind of language you can make use of when blogging. Alright, I couldn't stand not remembering so I went back to the post I was reading and it stands for HyperText Markup Language. Yeah, it's all so much clearer to me now! NOT!!! LOL. Well, at least I got the language bit right.

It's all the blogs fault really. At first I was satisfied with actually figuring out how to start a blog. I figured if I could work out how to post what I wanted to say - I'd be happy. WRONG. That kept me satisfied for a while. Then I wanted to add photo's and links etc etc etc.

Now why can't I just be happy with that? Nice and simple right? Fits well with my simple living journey. But NO.... now I want to learn how to use HTML.

And yes, I do blame Snoskred and yes, you can all applaud now (I hope) cos I just typed in my own HTML code (or whatever you call it) to do that link. :-)

I read some of Snoskred's posts about blogging and think "wow, could I do that?" LOL. Recently she did a wonderful post about basic HTML. You can find that post here . Ooh, I just found out that you have to get your "<" around the right way or the link thingy does NOT work. LOL. Or it works but you just get a highlighted full-stop or something that doesn't look quite right. :-)

Well, I think I have just completed my very first HTML lesson. And my brain didn't actually explode. Well no more than usual anyway. :-)

Now - can anyone help me with a simple way to shift my blog page from 2 columns to 3 columns? I've heard it's just a simple matter of changing some HTML. HA!!! That might be simple if you *speak* HTML. But I'm not quite that fluent yet. LOL.

If you notice some strange goings on with my blog in the near future - you'll know I'm going crazy trying to figure out new weird and wonderful things with my newly emerging language. LOL.

Just need to try one more thing.


If you don't have a clue what I was doing - just trying out the way to centre/center text. :-) Yah me! I can do 2 things now. As long as I don't lose the piece of paper that I wrote down Snoskred's instructions on. Of course, that's one of the reasons I had to put the link to her post on here - so I can find it again!

Lot's more to learn but that's enough for today. :-)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry but that post is hilarious! I don't "do" HTML anymore. I used to know enough that I did my own page from scratch, but I couldn't for the life of me do it now. It had tables and everything LOL!

As for the 3 column thing, I just used templates I found for free on the net. I'm so lazy I haven't even fixed all the links yet. If anyone can help with that...

Good luck with working it out!

Jill said...

OMG!! It is certainly another language! I have seem something about HTML on the blog site, but I just ignore it. I don't even know what I am doing with ordinary text, I am always mucking up my photos, getting them in the wrong place, and far too many line breaks! It takes me ages to sort it out before I can post it !!

Snoskred said...

I might have the answer to the 3 column thing too.. ;)

I saw some lovely templates the other day.. check these out.. which are very much more grown up than the blogger basic ones..

Pannasmontata Templates

Some of my faves from the collection are -

number 29 - Lands (3 column)
number 41 - Words At Sea (3 column)
number 57 - Abstract Thoughts (3 column)
number 58 - Abstract Mind (3 column)

Jill - HTML is really simple once you read a bit about it. You can copy and paste bits of code over and over rather than having to actually learn it.

Here's a complete list of all HTML tags. HTML Quick List

Cheers,
Snoskred

lightening said...

Thanks for that Snoskred. I did like a couple but I think I'm getting fussy. Will need to think about it some more. I want to keep things simple yet interesting at the same time. And reasonably clear.

Can I do links in comments the same way I'd do them on the blog?

Anonymous said...

oh my goodness that was a funny read. I KNOW what you mean about having a love hate relationship with your pc. Although I have to admit that since we upgraded from windows Me its become more of a love/loathe relationship! lol And I don't speak html yet either. Sorry

Unknown said...

lol at your post!!

I can do the linking "thing" I have the codes written on a post it note on the side of the monitor :)