Adventures in HTML-Land

Saturday
Today I feel like a genius.  I am currently working my way through theW3 Schools HTML Tutorial  and this being my first foray into the world of HTML, I am finding it quite thrilling to be able to tell my computer what to do.  I just made my name appear as a heading in bold, italicized text which is when I said aloud to myself "Wow! I did it!" I know that this doesn't suddenly make me the Albert Einstein of HTML, but this process of learning the very basics of computer language is slowly subverting the relationship between me and my computer.  I have always falsely perceived my computer as a brilliant, omniscient machine, but the more I learn, the more I understand it to be what it is - a tool of human intelligence. I agree with Fred Gibbs when he writes in his blog that "Even the tiniest ability to make a computer do what one wants rather than only what software allows is tremendously empowering."

Sunday
My illusions of grandeur momentarily faded away today. As I continued to read through the tutorial and practice different things, I felt increasingly helpless due to my inability to remember all the different rules. Trying to remember where to put quotation marks, colons, semi-colons and closing tags was a bit overwhelming and my "Aha!" moment of yesterday never came. But then, like a true historian, I realized it was pointless to try and retain all this information when I will always be able to look it up.  So I persevered onward and finished the tutorial, hoping to feel empowered once again. At this point, I have started to mark-up my own page and I am quite pleased with the results thus far.  I have successfully added some lines (fancy!), headers, underlined text, an unordered list, a link and....drum roll please....some pretty colours! Although my HTML experience today didn't start well, I am once again feeling comfortable and confident to continue with my HTML adventure. Onwards and upwards from here!

Monday
Today I finished marking up my very own page!  I had some difficulties toward the end with adding images to the page, but eventually made it work with a little help from someone much wiser than myself. The finished product is pretty simple and definitely won't take your breath away, but I am stepping away from it with a great sense of accomplishment. This exercise only touches the surface of what can be accomplished with HTML and I am eager to expand my knowledge further. Being able to comprehend what was previously a foreign language, even in the most basic sense, has made technology and computers feel more accessible.  I don't know if I ever will classify myself as a digital humanist, but gaining new skills in the technological realm equips and motivates me to explore the diversity of the digital world.