I've been poking at the site recently, updating the templates and sprucing them up a bit, as it were. Which I find both amusing and annoying; I just can't seem to stop picking at the site, and adding bits and pieces (see the new footer?), when what I want to do is write more content for the blog. I don't want to keep messing with things; for the most part I'm enjoying how the site looks and the layout and ease of navigating. But I just can't leave well enough alone.

I even went so far as to install Ghost on my local machine to start playing with that particular CMS to see if I wanted to install it on my site. Why? Mostly because... why not? I like to tinker and get a feel for something, but one of my bigger shortcomings -- at least in my eyes ( and if you think there are other, bigger ones, please keep it to yourself, thank you very much) -- is my lack of digging deeper and really getting to know how to work with, and learn what it is I'm tinkering with.

Now that it appears the website issues are back under control, I can move on with more Javascript practice. Before the snafu with updating the Grav theme I was using, I was working on some pretty basic stuff in Javascript, mainly reversing a string. In the post about it, I detailed using Javascript's built-in functions to accomplish the task. I mentioned that there was a way to also do the same thing using Loops, and that was what I was going to practice with next.

While looking over some of the examples to try and understand things better, I found that in latest version of Javascript -- ES6 -- there's now a for...of statement that loops over "iterable objects". Quite frankly, I wasn't sure what "iterable" meant (I figured it had to do with counting objects), so I looked that up.

Boy, I wish I hadn't.

Here I was, all excited about getting a new blog underway, with a new CMS to practice with, and of course, I blow it up within a day.

Which was stupid. I'm familiar enough with child-themes, having built a few with Wordpress. But my brain apparently checked out, and I went and heavily modifed the bootstrap-blog theme I was using. And then the next day, Grav notified me of updates that needed to be done. Being a good little web developer (ha), I always try to get updates in as soon as possible. Gotta keep those files up-to-date so the site stays secure, right?

So I updated Grav, as well as the theme, and everything just went to shit, to put it bluntly. It took me the better part of the day to figure what I'd done, and quite frankly, I'm still not sure I'm 100% certain what happened. On top of that, I don't even know why the new page I added -- once I had everything back to looking 90% of how it was -- won't show. It was a simple About page, but if I try to visit it, it just leads to the default home page (which is just my blog listings).

So back to the drawing board. Part of the reason I stopped debugging to write this out is sort of as a test. I want to make sure at least the blog posts show up. I can work on the individual pages seperately, just as long as the blog posts continue.

Fingers crossed!

I'm between projects at work, and there's only so much reddit I can peruse. One of the skills essential for a front end developer nowadays is Javascript and my skills have always been rusty at best. Rather than play on social media or my phone, I'm going to work on becoming more comfortable with Javascript. It's certainly a better use of my time.

There are dozens and dozens of resources out there, both free and paid. I think I'll start with some basics on YouTube and work my way over to freecodecamp. Or maybe vice-versa. Who knows. I'm also going to show what I'm learning here, and present it as if I were teaching you to code. I think that will help my overall learning process.

I'm going to start by trying to solve a question I was asked in an interview some months back, and see if I can work through that: Reverse a string. Let's go!

I'm not sure I could tell you how many blogs I've started over the years. I used to blog before it was called blogging, and was manually adding entries to HTML pages. While I might have been doing this for well over 20 years, I've certainly not been doing this consistently. Hopefully this time will be a bit different.

I like to write, when the mood strikes, and having a place to write about whatever I feel like writing about will be nice. As stated on the homepage, there's not really going to be any sort of focus; whatever strikes my fancy I suppose. There'll be talk of tech/geeky stuff, and music as well. Might be some photography plus the occasional photograph. Babbling mostly.

As this is the inaugural post, let me introduce myself. I'm Shad (my initials are SKI, hence the i-am.ski domain), an Arizona native currently living in Northern Virginia. I've lived here with my family for over twenty years now, and man does time fly. I work as a front end developer, but mostly I fix what the back end developers don't want to bother with. Which is mostly OK. I'm your typical suburbanite, with two kids (both grown), a house in the 'burbs, a truck, a motorcycle, and a wife who wishes I was was handier at fixing things. I'm one of those guys who can turn a two hour job into something that lasts all day with two or three trips to Home Depot or the auto parts store.

This website itself is pretty bare bones, and I plan on keeping it that way for the foreseeable future. Hopefully this helps me focus on the content rather than the presentation of said content. But I will give some of the geeky details: As of June of 2019, I'm using Grav to run it, as I a) like playing around with new CMS's and b) didn't feel like I need a database for anything. I'm running it with the Admin plugin to just make things a bit easier. It's running the Bootstrap Blog theme by Ayoze Hernández Díaz.

And that's about it. Like I said, trying to keep it bare bones.