Tag Archives: code

made of win

Sharing Knowledge

Amateur wireless station (LOC)Today, I had the privilege of introducing one of the students who started a blog to HTML. She knew about computer languages, to the extent that she knew you needed a language to get computers what you want them to, but she hadn’t thought about how you would need to have a language to make websites do what you want as well.

And now she not only knows that HTML paves the path to controlling what her site looks like, she’s already started learning the basics. I won’t lie; it was really fun watching her excitement at discovering how to create buttons and links. I felt bad reminding her about her homework.

But she did walk out with more information, and a broader field of passion, because she learned something new today. And she found the practical aspects, along with most of the information, by taking the initiative to search for what she didn’t know.

That’s what happens when we share the information that we have with those who don’t know about it. Will HTML change her life entirely? I don’t know. Some of the most poignant lessons in my life come from my Year 11 experiences. But with most of her life, and all of college, ahead of her, I may have only shown her the tools she can use to continue creating in yet another medium.

Watching her joy at playing with the basics for any website inspired me to really get back into increasing my coding knowledge. It will probably take me awhile, I do have a thing or two to do, but I’m excited to expand my collection of information. Because that’s what sharing knowledge does.

community, technology, writing

XFN

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So I was creating a blogroll today here. I’m not entirely sure what a blogroll really is, so I renamed it “blogs I read” because it seems like they’re close enough for me. In the course of doing that, there was this funny little section of the page to add links labeled “link relationship (xfn).” It looks like this:

wordpress-link-xfn

Yeah, I didn’t know what it was either. So I follow the link the screenshot shows and I found this:

xfn-quick-explanation

And I think this is fantastic. I hear a lot about how the internet is separating everyone and making us all more disconnected. And yet this connects people who use the internet and link to each other. This type of linking works beautifully to demonstrate how all the underlined words really represent people who know each other. I love that as we move more of our interaction only and express more of ourselves through writing, we are working out how to express our relationships through the written code that defines our world.