Over the Christmas break I made AldermanicWebsites, “a comprehensive index of the technology, design, and content of Web sites for candidates running for Alderman in the February 2011 Municipal Elections in Chicago, IL.”
I’m not a very skilled Web developer. I can’t write any code from scratch and I don’t know any programming languages. But I do consider myself to be an Internet developer, since I own about 40 URLs and have made hundreds of Web sites over the last 12 years or so. It’s sort of the same way as my relationship with cooking. I am by no means a chef, but I am certainly a practiced assembler of meals.
There’s all sorts of books and tutorials for real Web developers, but there’s a dearth of instruction for the middlers like me. That’s why I like to document my cobblings. Here’s documentation on the tools I used to pull together AldermanicWebsites:
EarlyAndOften
WordPress — the indispensible platform for creating Web sites. For people like me, without a lot of skill but having plenty of gumption, it gives you plenty of leeway between
Copy/paste — I mention this as a tool, because it is an amazingly powerful, oft-forgotten standard. We use it dozens of times a day (or in my case, when jumping from Early And Often to my spreadsheet, hundreds of times a day) and it doesn’t get enough love.
Update Scanner Firefox Add-on — this is an invaluable little doohickey that has allowed me to monitor tons of Web sites that do not have RSS feeds