This category covers area of different studies in web development.
So SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a huge part of my work even after building websites and past projects. One of my past jobs I had the task to make sure that each website would get seen and spidered by many of the major SERPs as fast and as soon as possible and to rank just as high within a short amount of time and as organic as possible.
In my career like many, I follow quite a lot of well known people in the same field who are developers or designers who are quite well versed in their knowledge as well content-creators. Have come to follow them on some online learning platforms like LinkedIn, Behance, Udemy or through FreeCodeCamp. Most I have initially found through YouTube, these are just a few of the top 6 in each category that are worth noting.
It’s rather interesting that recently a social media influencer would take to reading a small tiny lil post I created and share it with their audience in secret. To be honest I was a little taken aback to hear about it myself when a member who is part of their exclusive community felt the need to reach out to share this little nugget of knowledge with me since we see each others @handles often in other areas. First, I thought it was interesting but second, it is not quite the first time this has happened to me either.
So I ran into a bit of an issue with installing 2 different versions of XAMPP on my workstation for work. I don’t have a real development environment to work in like I did at my previous job with limited resources. So I figured I would document the issue(s) I ran into with my installation of XAMPP either for future reference or to provide some useful info for someone else that might stumble across the same experience I was having.
WHAT EVER BECAME OF THE “WEBMASTER” ?
Quite a while ago during my job search I was coming across so many different titles that I needed to identify how to describe myself and specialties in order to market my abilities. The landscape for job opportunities has definitely changed in the last 10-15 years and find that the knowledge I have within my field has been siloed into various roles.
My job title at a previous place of work (8 years) was Production Assistant / Web Manager. My daily tasks varied from updating web content-copy and cropping images to a website, design and code html newsletters as well as maintain multiple subscriber lists, running web metrics, create simple web banners, UI designs, search engine optimization work, to social media marketing and some print design work. It was more like an overall maintenance ‘job’. So when I was search of new work, I had become really confused which job titles I was coming across and what I should be looking at. My web skills are focused on HTML, CSS and intermediate JS with a little back-end knowledge in PHP.
Below is an example of the methodical process of combing through a large scale website(s) and assessing the SEO quality by researching, creating reports, and implementing changes that can help the growth of a site.
I love lynda.com training videos that cover an array of topics in web development. When I last logged in I came across a new video series called “Web Fonts First Look” by James Williamson. I thought this series was incredibly helpful and learned a lot more about typography for the web than I think I could have from 1 or 2 books on the subject.
Throughout the video tutorial, James Williamson works on a project called Alice in Web Fonts to demonstrate various techniques in web typography. He demonstrates with a few other fonts but one in particular called JUNCTION which I thought looked really nice! (Must consider using it in a project at a later date!)
Below are some of the notes I took as well as a lot of the resources mentioned from the video lessons.
I was first introduced to computers like most Xennials in grade school by something called “Logo Writer“. This was probably around grade school along 3rd or 4th grade. This program allowed the user to move a turtle graphic around the screen that could output a vector line with basic input commands. It was a like a HUGE deal back then as PCs were not quite yet in the home and programs like this were not in every school system. Can vaguely remember the teacher also having a physical turtle robot about the height of a child’s chair that you could sync with the computer via a ribbon cable so the commands carried over to this device could make those same moves in real life.