Learning Modern Web Development
Blair Fleming To open the Developer Tools, right click your mouse (on desktop) and select Inspect from the context menu. The Elements tab of the Developer Tools (Inspector tab on Firefox) lets you explore the computed HTML structure of the current page of your website. This view is particularly useful for debugging your layout and finding problem … Read more
A domain name is the root name of your website. It is the word(s) that come after the https:// or https://www. An example of a domain is forthdev.com (from https://forthdev.com) The domain name is stored in an online library called a Domain Name Service (DNS) server, along with the IP address of the server which … Read more
An algorithm is a set of instructions that an application uses to determine what to do. The instructions should never change and, for any given input, should always result in the same outcome for that input. An application should be able to follow an algorithm regardless of its current state, and end in the correct … Read more
An application programming interface (API) is a piece of software that provides a means of sending and receiving data, to and from a database. An external application may connect to an API and request data, at which point the API will process the request and extract the required data from the database before sending it … Read more
To stop a page from showing up on search engine results, edit the robots.txt file located in your public directory, and add the line “Disallow: /<your-page-url>/”. An example of this line might be: The example above will stop Google and other search engines from indexing the page at https://forthdev.com/index-example as well as any children of … Read more
To create a redirect link to a page, edit the .htaccess file located in your public directory, and add the line “Redirect /<your-link-text> <your-destination>“. An example of this line might be: The example above will redirect any visitor who tries to visit the URL https://forthdev.com/example to the page https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/htaccess/. If you use cPanel, you will … Read more
The blackest black (#000) is not necessarily the best choice of black background because other elements on the page will lose the opportunity to cast shadows. Consider using a slightly lighter shade of black which will allow the blackest black shadows on elements in the foreground to appear. An option for such a background black … Read more
To create a link in your WordPress post or page, highlight the text, then select the link option from the context menu. You can then enter the URL and choose whether the link should open from the current location or in a new tab. A good practice for deciding where links should open is: The … Read more
To create a new page on your WordPress website, visit the admin dashboard, then select the Pages > Add New option from the menu. Pages are different from posts. Pages represent a static location on your website that might include regularly acccessed resources and links. Examples of a useful page wold be an About page … Read more