Andy Dunn

A brief introduction to DNS

July 16, 2015 / No Comments / Posted in: Courses, Tips

Some technologies are technologies we take for granted. I remember my family were a little late to the game in getting connected to the internet, and it was only in 2003, when I was 14, that we actually got the internet at home.

Before that time, I essentially thought of the internet as being one technology, useful only for acquiring cheat codes for Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 on PS1 and our dearly departed MSN Messenger.

As for how websites were loaded, it was just a given — you type in the address of a website and it loads. A website has an address, and that’s the end of it.

Of course, that’s not the end of it.

The internet of course is a collection of different technologies that work together to provide a worldwide electronic network, which can be used to send data for a whole host of other technologies, the most prevalent being the World Wide Web (serving websites over the HTTP protocol), e-mail and FTP.

There’s one technology that could easily be taken for granted, at least if you’ve not set up your own website before — DNS.

It’s the service that lets you load a website by typing a domain name into the address bar of your web browser.

It’s also the service that ensures that e-mails sent to your e-mail address are sent to the servers your mail provider has created your mailboxes on.

Students of the Complete Web Developer course and non-students alike, listen up. Here are the essential facts you need to know about DNS.

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Andy Dunn
Andy Dunn is a web developing, photo taking, blog writing Wulfrunian based in Cambridge. He can generally be found on two wheels.

Developers’ Deliberations: Is it cheating to use WordPress?

July 7, 2015 / 2 Comments / Posted in: Courses, The Complete Web Developer Course

Is WordPress Cheating?

The feeling of creating something that is entirely your own handiwork is one of those experiences that fills the new web developers of the world with the same kind of pride reserved for the time you realise you’re riding your bike by yourself, and your parents let go several yards back.

Is the feeling of accomplishment marred by building a site using something that already exists though?

There are a lot of tools at your disposal as a foundation for a new website.

Rob teaches how to use two of the most commonly used foundations available in his complete web development course — WordPress and Bootstrap.

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to design a site around ready-made themes and plugins, and provides a back-end control panel to easily add new posts and pages. It’s also the most commonly used tool in the world used to build websites, being behind an estimated 24.1% of all websites online.

Bootstrap is framework offered by Twitter that defines specific element types and how to display them. You can then create a website by adding elements that you assign as having a specific type, allowing Bootstrap’s pre-made libraries to do all the formatting for you, leaving a sleek, consistent, and (unless you make a special effort otherwise) responsive site.

If you’ve spent good hours, days, weeks and months perfecting your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL skills though, why would you then want to surrender them to a mass-use CMS or framework?

What would be the point in making the effort to learn the fundamentals if you can fall back on a framework to do it for you?

This is a question that I’ve seen asked a few times, and though it’s an understandable question to ask, it’s not really the correct question to ask.

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Andy Dunn
Andy Dunn is a web developing, photo taking, blog writing Wulfrunian based in Cambridge. He can generally be found on two wheels.

Block & Inline Elements: What they are and how to use them

June 18, 2015 / No Comments / Posted in: Courses, The Complete Web Developer Course, Tips

Your websites are all made up of inline and block elements. The Complete Web Developer Course tutorials show you how to use these elements, though this post talks about some of the differences between the types of element, and where you would use each type.

An element is defined in HTML tags. A paragraph is a HTML element that is opened with a <p> tag, and closed by a </p> tag.

Emphasised text is defined by the <em> and </em> tags surrounding the text to be emphasised (typically in italics).

Though both <p> and <em> elements are text elements, there is one key difference between them.

Paragraph elements are block elements, whereas emphasis elements are inline elements.

In this post, I’ll be looking at three of the most common element types you’ll need to use, where to use them, plus a few bonus types.

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Andy Dunn
Andy Dunn is a web developing, photo taking, blog writing Wulfrunian based in Cambridge. He can generally be found on two wheels.

Five FTP connection issues, and how to fix them

June 11, 2015 / 2 Comments / Posted in: Courses, The Complete Web Developer Course, Tips

For those of you new to web development, one of the more common challenges before even getting stuck into learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the plethora of other technologies awaiting your new-found skills, is just being able to log in to get your work uploaded.

FTP is a venerable old method to upload your work to web servers. It stands for File Transfer Protocol, and nearly every web host in the world supports it.

In the Complete Web Developer Course, Rob has an FTP tutorial chapter that shows you one way of using FTP with the Firefox browser and the FireFTP add-on to easily update your site files.

Things don’t always go according to plan however. Here are five of the most common issues students have when connecting to their free Eco Web Hosting packages with FTP, and how to resolve them.

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Andy Dunn
Andy Dunn is a web developing, photo taking, blog writing Wulfrunian based in Cambridge. He can generally be found on two wheels.
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