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Welcome to Source Code Central! This was my first web site ever, and it started off looking significantly different than today's incarnation of it. Anyways, it was meant to both teach you guys out there how to program C++ console applications (basically, programs that ran in MS-DOS), as well as teach me how to make web sites. This is a pretty good place to start learning how to program, as pretty much everything else you'll do in the world of programming will assume you know these basic concepts and even the syntax.
Anyways, I previously only put in the "structure" of my HTML tutorial, but I never actually wrote the darned thing. In fact, I pretty much quit working on the site altogether. And that was the way it was until early 2004, at which point I picked up where I left off and wrote all of the content you see here today.
With the history out of the way, let me tell you the general direction that my web design tutorials take. They are intended to give the Notepad programmer the tools he needs to build a good-looking and efficient web site. As a Notepad programmer myself who has gone through numerous drafts of this web site, I think I am fairly well qualified to give such tutorials. You may not think that it's that difficult, but there are many hidden hardships that await the Notepad programmer who aspires to make his own web site. Hope you enjoy!
One new feature of the site is the theme selector, which will allow you to modify the look of the page for the duration of the visit. If you don't like this look, try another one!
I moved the About Me, Links/Thanks To, and Contact Me pages to the main site, because it's fairly stupid to have them in the Source Code Central site, and I like being consistant (now that being consistant is as easy as it is, thanks to PHP and MySQL). I also set up some redirects from the old pages, but they probably won't start working for a few hours. And if they don't, I'll figure something else out.
I just couldn't stand the disgusting time stamp that each news item had, so I added some formatting to it and made it look right, as well as much more readable. I've also been toying around with a number of other administrative functions. I swear I'm in heaven when I'm doin' this stuff!
I just realized a little while ago that adding new tutorials would be a very tedious endeavor under the nav bar system I had up. Basically, I would have had to go back and change every page that had nav bars (not as many as you might think, but still annoying) every time I added a new tutorial. Not the end of the world, but not a necessary evil either, so I made a few modifications, and now the system automatically updates everything on it's own! I friggin' love it!
I've just finished getting rid of most of the links to the old C++ Source Code site's content, but I know there are a number of other places left to look. Oh, and I've also modernized the main page between my two websites. Yep! It's now PHP as well. It'll now automatically update the left nav bar each time I make a relevent addition to Source Code Central. Now, back to link-hunting!
The PHP site is now officially live and (almost) fully functional! In making the site I automatically added a few things that I hadn't done on the old site yet, which is a great plus...I wasn't ever going to get those things done the old fashioned way.
Anyways, the new site is up and better looking than ever, not to mention more bug free than ever - I uncovered a ton of latent bad links that I got rid of and stuff, and PHP further protected me from those mistakes by freaking automating the vast majority of my website maintenence tasks, such as maintaining the nav bars and the like. Now is an appropriate time to say how freaking awesome PHP/MySQL is.
All that aside, all that's left to finish is the guestbook, which shouldn't take too long at all! Oh, and I'll also need to link back out of this PHP site to my old site, I guess. I'll get to that in due time.
The PHP version of this site is almost up, but there are still a few kinks to work out, as well as a few more pages to put up before I link to her from the old site. I'm ALMOST done though!