I missed the boat on learning linux/python/.php. I have enough programming experience to muddle around but I don’t have any of the fundamentals. My only real website building was writing straight HTML when I was in college but I don’t have a real understanding for the server structure, etc.

Back in my working days, I used to play around with Microsoft’s web hosting platform (IIS) and that was really difficult as well. There were so many nuances that the casual web user doesn’t really understand or have to deal with, such as browser caching. It seems so complicated and confusing enough that a reasonably technical guy doesn’t want to deal with it.

Today, I spent several hours trying to get this site back up. I violated the first rule of support which was to look at the simple things first. The site was working, but I had some SSL certificate errors which I tried to correct by removing the SSL. That spun me into all kinds of other problems when the real problem was simply to update a plugin for the site.

I suppose the beautiful thing about open source platforms is that there is so much knowledge just by searching on the internet. For a brief moment, I thought about trying to find a book like python/php for dummies. Now, that I have admitted to myself that it is harder than I thought, I would probably get some value by learning the fundamentals. Not today however, I learned what I needed to finish the job.

With so much information, we can’t know everything in a particular area. We can get bogged down in ‘toolbox fallacy’ and other paradigms rather than just learning the thing we need for the time and place. I suppose that if I am going to continue in this vein of content creation, it behooves me to learn some more. Right now, I have too much going on to warrant an investment of time right now.

I am starting a new job on Tuesday and still working on side work while finishing out Amazon. I have plans to build an office and that won’t be done for another month or so, at least. That is my outlook today.