The Geeks Blog

Ok, so I am looking to get into programming. I have tried to read the Program ming Perl book I have, but that assumes I know more then I do. my experience is in a little javascript and small bits of CGI and perl I get form elsewhere, I do not pretend to know all I need to know about those languages, but I do understand bits and pieces, enough to get a slight grasp of what I need to edit to get the minute changes I usually need. this is usually aided by comments in the scripts. What I want to know is a very low level book to get my in the door of programming. Preferably the text would be available at low or no cost, and would be aimed at knowledgeable computer professionals, but those who have little or no experience with programming. I do not understand arrays, and only vaguely grasp the concept of variables. I am proficient with HTML and some CSS(Cascading Style Sheets). Please, advice is greatly wanted. Thanks.

Dave just pointed me to a really cool site for programmer's. Programmer's Heaven has stuff on seemingly ever language. Assembler, perl, Basic, Visual Basic, you name it(ok, not Ruby, but it seems to be pretty new). Check it out.

Ok, that last post isn't displaying right. Therefore, here is the uploaded text file with the right info. The problem, I thought, was that the links to Mike, :bob:, and Brian had unescaped /'s. That did nothing. I see it is having some problem with the one for Keith, which I don't understand. This is why I do not program, and only code in HTML. HTML is very simple and easy to use. This.. well, makes no sense to me. Yes, a Geek without knowledge of perl or CGI. Bah. HELP!!!!!

It works! I went back and redid all of the \'s and such, and now it works. See? :sysblog: :chey: :bob:. Awesome! It doesn't appear in the MT editing area as though the code changes there, but I will look in a minute to see if it worked for changing the source right.

Update: yup. It all works. I had a guess that when I added the ' target="_"' piece I thought I would have to code it like this ' target=\"\_\"' after the problem in the comments of the original post said somethig about :chey: needing to \'ing dashes. - is a dash, but I thought maybe _ needed one too. I was right. Yay me.

Ok, I did my weekly look at the three version of this site, to see if any of the weeks changes did harm to the layouts. The ALT version I did for those who prefer black text on white background shows up fine, but the main index is not quite right. I am not sure what I did that could have caused this since my last visit to it about mid week, but I need to fix this, now. Anyone know why this would be happening? The only change I did was add the thing for the Geek to Gnomedex Campaign. I have noticed other times that some MT blogs have this happen, without clear explanation as to why. This, my friends, is why I despise CSS. Content can, without reason, change the look completely.

Not sure how, but I fixed it. All I did was remove the code for BlogChat from the template, and placed in the code from the ALT version. It Just Worked™ Cool. Can't say I am heart broken over that. I still hate CSS, but I can sort of live with it, at least for now.

Ok, so Christina, the person doing scripts on the JobWORKS site, and I are trying to figure out some script problems. See, we keep getting errors. We can't even get a most basic hello world script to run. We are getting a 500 error, which is a server error of some type. She seems to have fixed the Hello World, but I am not sure how we can fix and get the mail script working. [Update: It's apparently working. Now, to find out if they want one.]