The Reason for this Blog
I created my first website in the last year of the 20th century. The site lasted a few months, but then my Internet Service Provider was flooded during one of Houston’s infamous storms, and the company went under (in both equipment and money). Thus, the hardware that supported my software was no more.
I did not care at the time to try to make another website with another provider because I was satisfied with my experiment with my website and all that I had learned about HTML. (I did not know anything about Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript at that time.) [And, in reality, I still do not know much about those subjects.]
But in October of 2013, I started writing the code for my second website after I was asked by one of my Tai Chi teachers if I could enhance the Tai Chi website (or perhaps, create a new one). I said I would try to re-learn HTML and would also have to learn CSS and JavaScript. I bought some books on those subjects and worked most of the projects (all that my PC’s software would allow) presented in the books and then decided to “go for it” with that website. Naturally, I needed to get some experience and proficiency with those different types of software before I could ever try to change some other website.
I finally worked on my second website and had it running pretty good for a few years. But, as things happen, that website became stagnant for me because the service provider changed the way I uploaded changes. I was never able to figure out how to make the new upload process work. [I believe that the service provider has finally “dissolved” my old site since I get an error message when I try to access it. So, hasta la vista, baby.]
At any rate, I decided to pursue my “dream”, once again, of having my own web presence. To make a long story short, I found WordPress and decided to use that software. Luckily, I found three books on WordPress to get me started. One book is a 2009 Dummies book by Lisa Sabin-Wilson that I had read about a year ago. I read that book again in January of this year to refresh my memory. I needed more information and found a very good book by a man in England, Dr. Andy Williams. His book is WordPress for Beginners 2020. That helped me very much. After reading those two books, I still felt that I did not understand enough about WordPress. I searched again and found a third book. That book is WordPress the missing manual, 3rd edition (Oct 2020). That book filled in some more of the missing pieces in my mind. Finally, I decided to try to create my third website. So, in June 2021, after four or five restarts (that is, scratching all of the files and starting from step one again), I have learned much of what not to do and some of what I can do. Thus, this site.
Author Information
I have worked in Information Technology all of my life after college, starting out as an RPG II programmer on an IBM System/3 Model 10 computer (using the small 96-column punched cards), moving on as a FORTRAN IV programmer on a larger computer, advancing my career as a business programmer on a very large mainframe computer (writing code in PL1 [a great language] and COBOL [another excellent language]), changing duties to be a DB2 Database Administrator, and then changing platforms to be a SQL Server Database Administrator.
Occasionally I was “between jobs.” During one of those times, I read about Visual Basic (VB6 and now, VB.net). I’ve written several programs in the past couple of years in VB.net. (For a list of my programs, click “My Programs” or the same link on my Home Page.) I really enjoy that language (perhaps even more than PL1).
And now a plug for Duke Nguyễn and Hannah Trần (Duke’s wife): Their Tai Chi classes have always been free and enjoyable.
Carl Hruska
September 2021