I have struggled with undiagnosed ADHD for the majority of my life, and it wasn't until the past few years that I began treating it, learning new coping mechanisms, and unlearning bad habits I had developed. One habit I have struggled to kick is my additiction to technology and social media. It sounds silly to call it an addiction because everyone seemingly struggles with it as terms like "doom scrolling" would imply. For me, it has been a constant battle, especially considering how social media and apps are specifically designed to be as engaging as possible. Realizing this unhealthy relationship was impacting my quality of life led me to deleting all social media from my phone.
After adjusting to that, I realized that I missed connecting with people and sharing with my friends what was going on in my life. After reaching out to my friend from elementry school, Art, I discovered that he also did not use social media and instead had a website where he shares updates about himself. That is when it hit me: I could do the same thing, and use it as a way to learn (or relearn) a new skill, spend my time productively, and share what I have been doing with others, and I could even create my own portfolio to better market myself as a freelance musician!
So my journey begins. I say "relearn" because as a teenager, I had a really joyful experience customizing my myspace page using HTML. At the time, I read books on coding and learned cool tricks for how to change fonts, colors, add images, make the cursor do funnt stuff, and embed tools that would play music. If you don't know what I am talking about when I refer to myspace, let me summarize by saying this: you kinda had to be there, but it was fucking dope. Looking back, it is so cool that an older form of social media, before algorithms and targeted ads, would encourage users (teenagers at that) to learn a skill like coding html.
As a result, I am now relearning HTML. I understand some basics, like opening and closing tags, creating lists, formatting text, and adding images and hyperlinks. However, I am discoving that I need to also understand CSS in order to customzie my page, which is a new skill for me. Even then, just browsing the other websites on neocities and seeing what is possible is really encouraging and exciting.
How am I doing it?
After browsing a few resources and quick reference tables of HTML tags, I have landed on a course called "HTML & CSS for Absolue Beginners" by Kevin Powell on YouTube. So far, this resource has proven to be really thorough and easy to follow along with. I am several episodes in and a lot of it is review information so far, but there are a few things that are new to me. I am documenting my website each time I work on it in OneNote, and I am also using that app to take notes on basic concepts. Finally, I am using Neocities to code and publish my website. Kevin uses a different platform, but I am going to stick with this for now. My website is a couple of weeks old as of today, and so far I have learned about the website metadata header, how to create a navigation bar, how to properly organize and nest tags, how to create and link to sub pages, and how to change my background and text colors with the CSS page. I am considering keeping this entry as a running log as I learn new things, so check back occasionally. Thanks for reading!