Michael Ramsey – The Website! This is a Tagline?

Moke’s Learning to Code / Script Project

I recently decided to pick up learning the coding side of web development again. Back in high school I learned HTML in the mid-level courses, but the higher level courses focused on Visual Basic. I also learned some PBasic for the FIRST robotics competitions (I dont think there was a seperate Canadian one at the time) my school competed in, but these are something of a foggy memory more than 10 years later.

That's where this blog comes in. I've been working in online marketing since the end of college. I've learned a lot about analytics (Google's and Clicktracks among others), SEO, SEM, PPC, usability and a variety of other things. However, I've been feeling more and more like coding is what I would really prefer to be doing. I've always enjoyed that side of things, while link building and social media strategy has never really excited me that much. So I have decided to pick up where I left off a decade ago, and document my learning experiences. For now I'm sticking with this shared blog, but I'm going to setup a new site for this soon enough if I don't end up losing interest for some reason.

I'm going to aim to update this blog regularly with posts detailing what I have learned, what I found interesting or challenging, and other insights into the more technical side of web development. I'm planning to work in some posts regarding my current profession as well, and will certainly have some crossover between the two here and there. I'd like this blog to be a useful resource to others attempting to learn the same things as both a useful (if informal) technical reference as well as providing some moral support.

Here is my basic plan so far:

• Review HTML, making sure to pick up on the post-CSS changes.
• Fill in the missing gaps in my knowledge of CSS.
• Start (basically) from stratch learning JavaScript.
• Learn PHP from scratch.
• Learn SQL from scratch.
• Figure out what I need to know about HTML5.
• Then figure out where I want to go from there. I'm not really sure, but I'd like to know more about AJAX, DHTML, jQuery and XML. I figure I'll probably also take a look at VBScript.