8:26 am. Light slanting in through branches, screen, across the clean white table top, dappled across the laptop ... my day crawling into existence.
A little earlier, same thing every morning, here I am, supposedly a man, and she kisses me goodbye and heads for work, into battle, the making of the bread, while I, in my pajamas, in the warm kotatsu, read the paper, fretting over the usual questions of fairness, and pettiness, and the mysteries of aesthetics, then screwing up the Sudoku. (Blogger capitalizes Sudoku.) But, there is work to do. The vacuuming, the washing of the filters, the hanging of the laundry, or at least the removing of it from the washer into the basket. But this attempt to escape my fate, this writing, calls, and I set it up, and begin.
10:18. Oh, horrible. An hour and a half has passed and I've accomplished essentially nothing. Well, I shouldn't sell myself short. I don't believe in that. Still, it's hard.
I looked at a bunch of news on line. It's so right, and so wrong at the same time.
I really really want to put my own stamp on this on line world.
It's always the same whiny question: what should the web do? Yes, it's a whiny question, but calling it whiny is also a dodge.
Anyway, what can I do but write? So it's a question of having faith or hope, that just writing will get me somewhere.
I've been able to get this far: purchasing a domain, setting up a web hosting account. With web hosting set up, I can log on to a file manager. My domain, in effect, contains files. I can "open" one of them by surfing to its address in the browser.
Oh, this is so frustrating. Well, anyway, let this be a little primer on how the web works. If I open an html file the browser displays the page that's described in that file. The page is described using the language HTML. The browser knows, or figures, it's an html file if the last characters of the file name are .html (or .htm). If that's the case, the browser looks for HTML in the file. HTML is a syntax. If the browser finds HTML in the file, it displays what the HTML describes. If it doesn't find HTML in the file, it doesn't display anything.
I can open a file with a name that ends with the characters .txt and the browser will display the contents of the file as text. Text isn't a syntax, except in a very fundamental sense. Text is just a way of interpreting data. Files contain data - that's what they contain. Data is sequences of bits: 1s and 0s. Text is a way of interpreting data: it breaks the data into 8 bit pieces. There are only so many possible 8 bit sequences, and each one corresponds to a symbol, such as a letter or number or punctuation mark (as well as some others). To display the contents of a file the browser displays (more or less, according to certain rules) the symbols associated with the eight bit pieces it finds in the file.
I can also open one or another kind of image file, files ending in .bmp, .jpg, .png, .gif, and probably others. The browser will attempt to display the data in such files as an image, perhaps requiring correct syntax in the data to do so.
Using various means I am able to create html files, text files, and image files, in my domain's file system. These, however, are only part of the equation. They also represent the limit of my ability.
We all know that surfing to a typical page on the web displays assorted imagery, including imagery we can interact with in various ways. What's on my mind is the kind of page which allows us to create our own pages - which people can then surf to to view imagery we have specified. How can I create such a page?
"The ignorance we have is causing people to suffer."
Everyone knows there are dozens of such pages around the web, if not hundreds. Why would I want to create my own? Just to make sure, I went back to the search engines to see what I could find that's new. My feeling that none of them offer what I'm looking for was confirmed.
Holy Cow, I finally figured out how to get that file upload dialog box! It just clicked: search on "how to implement a file upload dialog in my web page" (or something of the sort). I have been trying to find this FOREVER. But, no wonder it was so hard ... it's sort of complicated. I mean, getting the file upload dialog is easy - it's just an input element of the type "file" (<input type="file" /> in a form element - but what do you do once the file is uploaded ... that's the hard part. Anyway, what a breakthrough, after all this time. The most useful link I found is here. It seems - even sais it is itself - out of date, but it's still worth reading, for sure.
