My website at simon-liles.42web.io is now actually running. It does not look nearly as professional as this blog, but I am building it from scratch. Right now there is not a lot to the website, just the home page and a link to another page that runs a small JavaScript. Learning to write scripts like these has been a learning experience for me. My previous programming experience has been with more heavy duty languages for building applications.
I started by building the HTML pages and testing them locally on my machine. Once I got the pages to where I wanted them, I uploaded them to the hosting provider through FTP. An interesting artifact of this whole process that I came across is after I changed the files on the server, I would open the page in a new tab, none of the changes would take effect. The old version would persist until I reloaded the page. I did try opening the page in a new window, but even that would not work. An issue such as this makes me wonder if the page was being held in a cache somewhere on the network, or even my device, and the cached version persisted until I forced it to reload and make a call to the server.
Writing in HTML is weird for me. The closest thing I can compare it to is Markdown Language, but HTML is obviously much more complicated and harder to get right in terms of formatting. I do not know what to think of JavaScript yet. The language is weird and full of eccentricities thatI have not encountered before. As I have been learning more about HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, it has become obvious to me that these are only a part to a greater whole. The amount I can do with just HTML and JavaScript feels really limited. I suppose this is highlights what is Front-End Development and what is Back-End Development. Knowing that I will be able to do so much more with my website by adding a backend makes me excited to learn PHP and SQL.