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We've had a bit of rain lately on the so-called Sunshine Coast ...

How to learn website development - link dump

Just did a bit of Googling on how best to learn to develop a website and figure here is as good a place as any to "dump" the results so I have easy access to them in the future. The order of learning seems to be generally agreed upon at least to start with:

1. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language - a language used to format a website, eg use a table here);
2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - used to set up overall formatting for things like bold text)

Note: a) No, I don't really get the difference between HTML and CSS just yet;
          b)Yes, it is still recommended to learn a bit about them even if you end up using a Content Management System like WordPress or a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver that takes care of most of the details for you - eg I suspect if I knew a bit of HTML, I could have indented these notes!

3. Javascript, PHP (both programming languages that allow a page to be dynamic, ie respond to the person using it. Javascript runs within the browser on your PC, whereas PHP runs on the server, ie the machine that sends the website to your PC)

This page, The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Own Website, gives an overview of the whole process and links to other useful tutorials and resources.

Lots of people mention Code Academy, which is an interactive online tutorial site covering such things as HTML, CSS, jQuery, Javascript, Python and Ruby. W3Schools also rates a lot of mentions, but seems to be very unpopular in some quarters. I also found CodeAvengers and a 30 day course in HTML and CSS at TutsPlus. All these online tutorial sites appear to be free to use.

There are also numerous books written about website design, development and the various technical aspects. One recently published book is "HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites" by Jon Duckett seems to be getting excellent reviews at Amazon and elsewhere. "Build your own website the right way using HTML and CSS" by Ian Lloyd is also recommended, although as pointed out in some of the Amazon reviews, the portions on linking to Facebook no longer work (due to the volatility of Facebook rather than any fault on the part of the author).

The human microbiome

The human body is traditionally considered to be made up of some 10,000,000,000,000 cells, the basic building blocks of all life. But your body, if it is typical, has living in (or on) it, ten times more microorganisms (mostly bacteria) than cells. Although we are used to thinking that bacteria cause disease and need to be eradicated using antibiotics, it is now widely accepted in the scientific community that the microorganisms that have established themselves permanently in your body, your normal microbiota or flora, rather than causing problems may actually serve a useful purpose. As a simple example, E. coli bacteria living in the large intestine produce vitamin K and some of the B vitamins which can then be absorbed into the bloodstream and utilised by the body. Amongst the general public, the perceived importance of gut bacteria underlies the current trend of ingesting probiotics in the form of various drinks or yoghurts. Medical professionals are also increasingly likely to recommend taking probiotic pills in conjunction with, or after, a course of antibiotics, to help restore normal gut flora.

The Human Microbiome Project was established in 2008 by the US National Institutes of Health to identify the microorganisms that are found in both healthy and diseased humans and to “explore the relationship between disease and changes in the human microbiome”. In mid-2012, they announced that based on samples from over 200 men and women, they had established a reference database containing what is considered to be a normal human microbiome. Subsequent research has uncovered links between abnormal microbiota and problems as diverse as chronic sinus infections, intestinal ailments and obesity. The documentary “The Autism Enigma”, aired in Australia on ABC’s Four Corners last year, explored the idea that diet and antibiotic use may have disturbed the normal gut flora in some children with autism. In the future, maybe treatment of disease may focus on re-establishing normal flora in an affected part of the body using some sort of probiotic strategy, as well as, or even instead of, the traditional antibiotic strategies.

And if you’ve ever wondered how our hunter-gatherer ancestors managed without dentists, it has now been shown that, due to their different diet, they had different bacteria in their mouths and therefore, fewer problems with decaying teeth.

How to learn everything?

If you wanted to learn about everything, where would you start? I don’t mean trying to learn everything about everything – which is no longer possible in today’s world - but just having a reasonable grasp of the basics of everything, enough to go deeper later on if you want to and enough to allow you to make connections between usually disconnected topics. For example, learning enough about cooking to know how to do the basic techniques (boiling, frying, steaming, etc) and to have some idea about flavour combinations, but not the details of every possible technique and cuisine available.

If I landed in a strange city and wanted to find my way around, I would need to have some idea that cities can be represented by maps and how maps can be accessed and read, or I would need to know who to ask and how to ask for directions and have the ability to understand the answer. So, I wonder if what is needed is a “map” of knowledge and some idea how to navigate it. Maybe that is what we should be teaching at schools rather than lots of detail on a few areas that are somehow deemed to be the most important. Maybe then the end result of compulsory education would not be adults who don’t know how to budget, how to cook, how to eat healthily, how the political system works, etc, but instead adults who have basic life skills, a clear picture of the breadth of human knowhow and the ability to find and learn from reliable sources of further information as they either want or need to.

As someone who is a “scanner” by inclination, that is, “someone who frequently has a multiplicity of interests ...” (see Barbara Sher’s book Refuse to Choose), I like the idea of having a map that I can “peg” my different bits of learning onto, but haven’t really been able to find one. I have given some thought to trying to create one for myself and wonder whether all knowledge could be categorised under the broad headings of Arts, Sciences and Skills, with Arts and Sciences including the obvious topics which tend to get taught formally and Skills including things like how to learn, how to play a sport, how to cook – basically active things that you can be taught “how to” do. Having pondered these categories for the last month or so, I haven’t yet thought of anything that wouldn’t fit into one of the three (although I suspect some things may fit into more than one), but since I don’t know what “everything” is yet, I could easily be missing something.

Grammar, etc

As a sometimes grammar (and spelling) nazi - I blame my parents - I found this discussion of the so-called Oxford comma wars fascinating (so-called in reference to the Oxford University Press style guidelines). I have done a bit of editing of other people's writing and always "corrected" such phrases as "red, white, and blue" to "red, white and blue" omitting the comma before the "and". Now, I discover that there are good arguments on both sides of the debate and I have been taking the anti-Oxford comma side along with a majority of the UK and against those in the US. Here's just one example from the above-linked post:

"The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."
[This] supports the use of the Oxford comma, but only because it keeps Mandela from being a dildo collector. However, even the Oxford comma can't keep him from being an 800-year-old demigod.

The same source that mentioned the Oxford comma wars also linked to this post about the use of space(s) after a full stop. At some stage during my public service work career I picked up the habit or rule that one should use two spaces after a full stop at the end of a sentence. Now it seems that this habit needs to be broken. The convention was first introduced when typewriters meant that each character took up the same amount of horizontal space - called monospacing - and the use of a double space at the end of a sentence made it easier to clearly see sentence divisions in somewhat unevenly spaced characters (where, for example "i" takes up the same horizontal space as "m") and hence made the text easier to read. Nowadays, the vast majority of fonts are proportional (with the notable exception of Courier) and the use of a double space in a proportional font actually makes text harder to read.

Having done my utmost to check this post for grammar, spelling and double spaces, I will tentatively send it out into the world. Feel free to let me know of any errors that have slipped through as I just adore irony!!!

Crossword grids

I guess I've noticed over the years that there are different types of crossword grids, but I never realised that they actually have names which link them to various countries.  I reckon the British style ones would be harder to complete than the US style since there are less overlapping squares (the US ones actually require that every letter has to be part of both a down and an across word).

Previous blog

As I inferred in my first post, I have tried this blogging thing previously.  Having now attempted unsuccessfully a number of time to import posts/comments from my original blog, I've given up and will just say that if you're interested in a couple of dozen posts I made between late 2004 and early 2007, see http://aninquiringmind.blogspot.com/

First post on new blog

So, I'm thinking about blogging again for various reasons, eg to practice writing, to consolidate learning, to produce something tangible out of all the web surfing and research I tend to do on whatever the latest "shiny thing" is that has caught my eye. Let's see what happens this time ...