Web Coding Woes

I have not done the work that I set out to do for my reviews site. The reason for that is I am looking for an intelligent way to do it with coding above and beyond HTML. The first step I took was to try my hand at Microsoft Visual Web Developer. I have always been pretty reticent to work with WYSIWYG software because it generally creates messy and bloated code. I had someone who knows their way around web coding look at one of my sites and he was much impressed by how clean, neat, and orderly everything is. My answer as to why that is was simple, I code things by hand so only what I want is in there.

So far using Visual Web Developer I have dropped some things into a page, an aspx extension, and fiddled around with the controls. The help section isn't very helpful and everything has a tonne of options with names that make little sense to me. Also, some of it does crazy things by default; like a vertical menu that only appears when you hover over a little triangle making it essentially a pull down when I want something on-screen. However that is the only vertical menu available in the navigation section.

This certainly beats what I saw when I hooked up with Microsoft's Popfly beta. There it said menus and navigation were coming soon. At least Popfly is easy to use and understand. I built a pretty cool mashup with it following the tutorial. I'll have to go back there and see what I can make and then port them out to wherever. In the meantime I'm pursuing other avenues of exploration. Such explorations will include database driven website construction, and work with PHP. The two may actual converge, which would be a bonus.

Just as a final note I also tried installing my own Apache server, but it's virtually useless to do so since you have to physically use a computer connected to a different internet connection otherwise you forever get your local version without so much as stepping a toe onto the internet which its pretty pointless. Like I want to have to go elsewhere to test. This is without mentioning that I couldn't run CGIs since they ran locally meaning not at all.

Mood: bored.
Music: Back in the Village by Iron Maiden and March of the Pigs by Nine Inch Nails.

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