La Experi­men­tal

https://experimentals.dericksmith.com/

I built this site for a theatre group I co-founded. Sadly, the group disbanded before this saw the light of day (Don't worry, we're still all friends).

I decided to knuckle down and write a non-SQL relient PHP site from scratch. I dove deep into learning basic PHP, and even built what I hope are secure forms. It uses a heavily modified Skeleton CSS framework.

What I learned

  • Basic PHP (layout and form validation)
  • Basic PHP form security
  • XAMPP
  • Skeleton CSS (and what makes a neat CSS Framework)
  • w3c web form guidelines
  • A lot about e-mail headers and Character Encoding.
  • Character Encoding is complicated.

Tribute Page

http://www.project-url.com

This is a Free Code Camp exercise: create a tribute page. I made a toungue-in-cheek tribute to the greatest song in the world.

What I learned

  • Web Fonts
    • How to convert fonts to web fonts (legally, with open source fonts and Font Squirrel).
    • How to host web-fonts.
    • Fancy font stuff with CSS (word spacing, character spacing, what Oblique means. Basically: Italic.)
  • Styling a list-item's numeral is way more difficult than it should be.
  • Academic referencing of music videos is painful.
  • The song Tribute is still amazing after 100 listens.

Binary Appreciat­ion Survey

https://binary-appreciation-survey.netlify.app/

This form was created for a Free Code Camp project: a basic form with HTML 5 Validation. I decided to go crazy have fun and theme the entire thing around Binary. The old-style terminal followed naturally.

The form doesn't submit to anywhere, and the home-made captcha-thingy doesn't work. Those were out of scope for the project.

What I learned

  • A lot about styling form inputs and how they are rendered.
  • <details> & <summary>.
  • More than is useful to know about the DEC VT320 Terminal.