HTML and the Creative/Destructive Power of a Typo...

I spent most of my tutorial time at the w3 schools website and found it very helpful, particularly the "try it yourself" button which brings up the joint screen into which you can plug html code and see its result display immediately.
Though I've spent several years of my life working in the graphic design field, everything I learned then was for creating printed output. I've never made much headway learning html or being able to create my own web pages. Perhaps this is because I've always found the lack of control that the designer ultimately has over a browser based "document" to be difficult, as an artist, to accept. The fact that you might put all this effort into a website that might not display correctly on a different browser or screen, with different default fonts and resolution always seemed uninspiring at best. Still, there have been many times when web design knowledge would have been very helpful. There have been three times in my life now that I've spent some time learning html, only to find I'd completely forgotten it by the next time I needed to use it. This time was no exception. I could remember almost nothing about HTML from 504 which I took almost exactly two years ago...though I suppose the tags and syntax were a little less alien to me once I got back into the tutorials.
When I re-discovered the url (thankfully posted in the assignment pages) for the website I created during that hectic morning in the basement of the UofA library two years ago, it was so strange and interesting. It was like a veil to the past lifting....I hadn't thought about that web page since that day 2 years ago. It was like reading an old letter, glimpsing a previous version of self. And though you can't really tell from my lack of any real progress in html, I have made some progress in understanding the core concepts of librarianship and helping the rural library where I've worked for the past five years take a few lasting steps forward.
When I noticed a two year old typo sitting there on my page I was suddenly seized with the desire to fix it---immediately, and in the process I began to understand the the site and the outline of how it is hosted to a greater extent. Thoughts I'd been having about quitting the class (after, ironically, another typo earlier in the day caused a system failure for Ubuntu) thankfully started to dissipate. I successfully installed the PuTTY and WinSCP applications and was able to log in and update my own forgotten web site as well as add a subfolder to my directory. I used the dual windows from w3 schools to paste in my old html code, fix minor errors on the now archival page, and then add an update at the bottom.
This was all rather exciting since I remember blindly and barely being able to follow instructions during 504 to create that page and getting lots of help from my neighbor to complete the tasks. I didn't really have an overall grasp of what I was doing or how to navigate back there again. Now I think I do understand how to get back to that server, how to upload files, and how to make changes to the web page. Progress.