So, despite my last blog's goals for a new homepage, it hasn't happened ... yet. But. It is on it's way.

Learning Process

I started the popular goal of #100daysofcode. The rules are pretty straight forward.

1. Code minimum an hour every day for the next 100 days.

2. Tweet your progress every day with the #100DaysOfCode hashtag.

The 2nd part is not only to keep you to your word but great marketing on their part. If I feel the need to keep my twitter followers updated, I will code for an hour a day and tweet about it. Their hashtag gets shared everyday, people like it, people share it, getting their own twitter profiles more attention, and so on. And I will admit, it has worked. If not for the pure fact that people on twitter can be really nice and I like positive reinforcement. I also like spreading that positive feeling, following the #100daysofcode twitter bot (or what I assume is a bot),  @100xcode, I get to see others progress and like their tweets. Because I genuinely love to see people learning things they're excited about.

Where?

I've been using a mixture of things to learn. I started out on LinkedIn because I had liked their other courses.  I've gone through content marketing, Kindle ebook building, and Google Analytics courses so far and it seemed like a natural progression to learn Web Development on there. However, I wasn't getting as far with JavaScript as I had wanted. I wanted something that would test me more.

Thanks to the internet and twitter, I found freeCodeCamp. My original goal was to go through the last bit of CSS I wasn't comfortable with, then hop into JavaScript. Then I discovered I really wanted that certificate to show I had finished the first section for Responsive Web Design. I'm not even sure the certificate will ever mean anything, I just really like certificates. So I went back and finished the whole course. Now, thanks to using Webflow, I'm able to easily practice most of what I learned in CSS as I make progress on this homepage.

I'm a few lessons into the JavaScript one, and a few videos in the JavaScript course on LinkedIn. My plan is to use both along side each other. Reinforce my knowledge with two versions and get two certificates ;).

I'm not sure how fast I'll get through this as I'm also working on a LinkedIn learning path for digital marketing, working on a Photography course, and trying to learn Spanish.

Any Progress?

I have been tinkering with the Homepage a tad. The main reason I'm stuck is my desire to not look like everyone else. Though there is a benefit in the internet "losing it's creativity". Everyone knows where to click for what. So while I do want my website to be easy to navigate, I also want it to be unique in some sort of way.

Normally I don't like to follow trends but since the mouse hover animation isn't useful on phones, I'm drawn to the trend of scroll animation. I'm not talking about 1 page websites. I reallllly dislike 1 page websites. But since I'm not skilled in any sort of scroll animation whatsoever, I'm stuck with the homepage living in the draft section. This is where I'm currently at:

Goals:

• Get the 3 words to be the only things on the screen upon loading
• Somehow get people to scroll down
• First scroll level: "fiction" and "freelance" vanish and a block pops up with the latest blog and blog categories
• Second scroll level: "fiction" reappears, "blog" vanishes, and the blog block scrolls away to show the fiction block with similar items
• Third: ... you get it.
• Build a freelance page....
• Rainbow background that transitions from red to purple as you scroll (for the whole website) without looking cheesy. Very diluted rainbow colors.