One Win at a Time.

I'm working on building my first website.  Currently muddling my way through HTML, PHP and MySQL.  I knew that things would not be as blissfully simple as all those beginner tutorials and free online classes would have me believe.  However, its all good though because I love those daily wins I get when I finally get something to work.  I feel that I'm in a sort of beginner to intermediate stage where I know how to do things but its done in an inefficient and cloogy way.  But I also know that there are ways to simplify things, however, using those bits of code tricks is not straightforward.  Nonetheless, I'm getting there.  This past week was focused on figuring out how to create a form in HTML, which includes textareas, selection and option menus; then, using PHP, get that data into a MySQL database.  Today I finally got all of the elements of the form to go into my database and populate three different tables.  So, one might think that is pretty much all that has to be done.  However, I'd say this one webpage is at the halfway point because now I need make sure its defensively programmed and protect it from being used in ways I never conceived of.  I read somewhere that a good programmer still looks both ways when crossing a one way street, because there's always that one person who's going to do the unexpected.

I also need to add a proper way to input a date on my form and then learn CSS so I can make it look pretty.  Eventually, I'll also want to add Ajax and Javascript to make it more dynamic so that as one begins to add a project it will show a list of projects that seem similar to prevent any duplicates from being added.  Also I'd rather have scrollable checkboxes instead of requiring people to hold down CTRL while they click to select multiple items.  I'm sure as I do more I think of more things to do.  For now, I'll have to settle for one win at a time.