Let me try to write 500 words as quickly as I can. I really need to get back to writing this blog more regularly. I think I have written only one other post this month. Not good enough. My purpose in writing this blog is to get daily practice in writing, and I have not been honoring this recently. I should probably take it easy on myself, though I really do need to develop a daily writing habit.

I have been coding a lot lately, so let me do my usual thing and break it down into an outline form. Let me not use an ordered list today, but instead I’ll just use bold slugs at the beginning of a number of paragraphs.

Wordpress: I have been working lately on a Udemy tutorial on Wordpress development. Very interesting. Most of what we work on goes in one ear and out the other, but I’m getting some experience with writing PHP. The instructor has been doing Wordpress development for quite some time so the stuff just rolls out for him - he seems to have memorized a lot of Wordpress commands and PHP code. The nice thing about Udemy tutorials, though, is that they remain available for us to refer back to in the future. I may just end up doing this tutorial more than once.

JavaScript: I have continued to work on learning JavaScript, but it is still difficult for me. I’ll bet it is one of those things that will just snap into place at some point. Until then I’m going to remain mostly in the dark. I do enjoy working on these tutorials, and I recently acquired a book that emphasizes ES6 script. I’ll just keep plugging away at this stuff until it makes more sense to me.

Gulp: I’ve done one Udemy tutorial that used Gulp extensively, and I am totally sold on it. Gulp automates so much of the development process it is hard to imagine doing a complex project without it. Gulp can automatically update CSS files when using SASS as a preprocessor, it can act as a development server, and it can automatically update a page while you develop it. Very handy stuff. It’s still a bit above my head, but I got enough of it to know just how helpful it will be.

CSS: I have worked quite a bit on some more advanced CSS tutorials, and a bunch of it has sunk in. I like it when tutorials are project-based, leaving me with something yet again that I can add to a portfolio. I just finished one project that, while I’m not crazy about the color scheme, is a very advanced layout. I got a chance to use SASS as a CSS preprocessor, so that was satisfying. I have done tutorials on SASS before but haven’t been left with a sense of how to actually use the framework. Now I have an example I can refer back to in the future when I want to create pages in this way. Great tutorial, and I’m not finished.