Fear of Programming

"I'm not a programmer". I understand. You just want to write your blog, you don't want to get into the mechanics. A lot of you don't even want to know anything about HTML and CSS, right?

I get it, really. I'm the same way with my car: I used to do tuneups and minor repairs, but you know how it is: I'm older, the cars are a lot more complicated now, so I leave all that to the mechanics now. I just drive the the thing and put gas in it when I need to.

Nowadays you can do the same thing with your website. When I started writing web pages in the early 90's, you had to know a lot of stuff. Heck, just getting on the Internet at all was pretty deep geek territory and writing web pages required strong knowledge of HTML at the very least - often you had to know quite a bit about web servers too. But today? If you can type (even if it's hunt and peck), you can have a blog.

So why learn any programming or HTML and CSS for that matter? Leave that for the web mechanics.

You can do that. Maybe it's exactly what you should do. I could probably get better gas mileage and could definitely save some money if I did my own automobile work, but I just don't want to make the effort any more. You could do more with your website if you knew more about what happens underneath, but maybe you just don't want to make the effort either.

It's a lot of effort, right? That programming stuff is HARD.

Well.. maybe. Some people find it hard, but I think it's ironically amusing when someone who thinks nothing of constructing a complicated Excel spreadsheet tells me that programming is hard. To me, making a complex spreadsheet is hard - you actually are programming when you do that, but you are using a horribly clumsy "language" to do it. If you can program "IF/THEN" decisions in a spreadsheet, you can write programs.

Probably 75% of web site programming is just using "print" statements to put something on the screen. Can you understand this little Perl program snippet?

 print >>EOF;
 
 Hello.
 
 EOF
 

Pretty baffling, right? Easily 75% of programming for the web is just that simple. You are writing stuff on the screen. Of course that "stuff" is likely to include a lot of HTML tags and CSS styles, but there's no rocket science there either.

The more you know, the better off you are. Having real control of your web pages gives you the power to do complicated things easily.