There's a plethora of JavaScript books available for those who learn best by reading. Every single book I've picked up over the years (and I'm embarrassed to say how many I have that I've only picked through), has started with "The History of JavaScript", to some degree.

This annoys me.. I really don't care about the history. Does a mechanic open a manual on how to fix an engine and the first chapter is "The history of the internal combustion engine"? While I haven't checked any manuals lately, I would bet not. So why does it seem every JavaScript book needs to delve into the history of the language? The syntax and structure of JavaScript is nothing like it was back in 1995, much like a modern engine only slightly resembles an engine from 100 years ago. Maybe that's a bad analogy, as they're still using combustion to force pistons to turn a crankshaft to power a drivetrain (man, why hasn't the engine developed past that?), but you get the idea. I want to get to the practicality of the language, I don't believe I need to know it was originally called Mocha, then Livescript then blah blah blah.

In a previous post , I mentioned that I had installed Ghost "just because". Which essentially means I can't leave well enough alone. In this case it turned out to be a good decision.

While I did like the flat-file structure of Grav, I was getting annoyed by several minor things, which added up to me deciding to just say "Screw it!", and install Ghost as my CMS of choice. The install of Ghost was a bit trickier, due to my host, but I found a good guide to get me through and within the hour, I had it setup and running. I only had six entries from my Grav install, and I had copied those to a text file previously. So it was a fairly painless process to post them in Ghost and get them tagged as I saw fit. Then I zipped up the theme I was using on my localhost (mnml, with some changes specific to me. Again, I found another how-to to accomplish that), uploaded it, and I'm happy with the result.

So far.

Hopefully, I will leave well enough alone. I'm sure I'll have some small changes here and there I want to fix, but overall, I should be good to go for the most part. Now it's time to get back to learning. Javascript will be my main focus. Or at least, should be. I did just upgrade to Bitwig 3. That's been a lot of fun to play with.

No, not the old sitcom.

In the quest to learn (insert subject here), it's important to practice a bit every day. At least for me. Some days, however, are quite the challenge for me. I want to get better at Javascript, but I find myself bouncing around topics. Three days ago I was going back through the freecodecamp.org Basic Javascript curriculum and making my way (again) through their tutorials. Yesterday, for some reason, I started watching a React tutorial on Youtube. I keep telling myself I need to learn to walk before running, but my scatterbrained self gets distracted easily. And then some days I don't want to practice coding at all and instead want to play within Logic Pro, or Ableton, or Reason.

Maybe I need to practice focusing on one particular project. Perhaps there's a YouTube video about that... oh, look, "The Office" bloopers!

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.