Cracking the Code |

I’ve always admire the girls that get to say they #code. #Girlswhocode always seemed like that exclusive, really smart club I could only watch from the outside. I’ll admit I’m not the best at math so I figured that club would always remain exclusive, they had to be good at math, right? I imagined their club entrance exam to have one question and that question was just: are you good at math? They would probably take one look at my answer (no (obviously)) and throw it in the trash. So was I a little intimidated to start coding? Absolutely!

So when I wrote my first official line of code (<h1>Get To Know Me</h1>) I was expecting somebody to break down my door and call me out for being a faker. Was coding really that easy? I wrote a header title next to the brackets that said h1 (header 1) and a header appeared in big bold type. Where was the math? Was I officially a #Girlthatcodes? “This is so easy!”, she said naively, not knowing that God Himself was laughing at her.

Starting off with a prewritten code is probably one of the easier ways to get things started. I had just about everything I needed already set up and the things I didn’t have set up I just copied and pasted into Dreamweaver. Everything I coded showed up in a small window above it which made it easy to see when something wasn’t working.

The only real problem I ran into was trying to get my image to appear. That took a little time and a S.O.S to my professor but eventually that hill was conquered too.

Then came the previously mentioned God-laughing at me part. I would have laughed at myself too if I wasn’t about to have a nervous breakdown because nothing I was doing was working (Kidding! Kind of!). I was trying to upload my code to my My Web Space and have it be accessible to anybody with the url. I tried over and over again to get it to upload from DreamWeaver, but I realized that would be impossible. Not for any real reason in particular, it just doesn’t upload! How fun is that!

So I moved onto FileZilla and somehow ended up giving myself two viruses during that software installation. Cool cool. But thankfully I had a video explaining what do to and how to upload everything smoothly. So everything went well except that it didn’t at all and I found myself retrying the same five steps over and over again refreshing the My Web Space page endlessly hoping something would eventually change.

You know they say the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result… moving on!

Eventually I switched over to Cyberduck hoping for God to stop laughing at me and throw me a bone. He didn’t and now he was laughing along with all of the #GirlsWhoCode. Back to FileZilla.

I checked on the instruction sheet again to see if maybe I missed something and I noticed that there was a note that said to save my code as index.html. Surely that wasn’t going to be the thing that made my code work, right? It’s just a file name so what purpose could it really have?

Remember earlier when I said I thought coding was easy.

So changing the file name did the trick somehow and finally (finally!!!) my website was looking good! Except that I couldn’t get my photo to show up. I think God finally took pity on me but it was a monkey paw kind of situation so I would get it to work, but not all of it. Honestly, I’ll take it because that was the most intense hands-on learning experience I’ve ever had.