A Triumph

One thing I never even considered when I started blogging was that I would discover "a whole 'nother skill" (that's local dialect, by the way). As most bloggers do (I guess), I have [re]discovered the joy of programming--and it's not your high school BASIC we're working with anymore. In the process, I have learned enough about HTML to customize my blog pages somewhat, which has pleased me inordinately.

Then, I developed a desire to have my book reviews ("Books I've Read" in the menu above) display as what they call "post summaries" with links to the whole posts, so the reader can see a list of books/authors all together. Today....I FINALLY DID IT! I won't say how many times I've worked on the programming (quite a few) before actually achieving the Post Summaries/Links format and having it be specific to those posts I wanted to apply it to--

BUT--I'm so thrilled (we must appreciate the small victories, you know) that today I put together exactly what I had envisioned: on the Book reviews only, (a major feat, considering how the formatting is typically either universal or nonexistent) you see a list of titles and authors with a "teaser" line of the review--and a link to click through to the entire review. After the work I did to learn HTML and figure out "if/else" conditionals, styles and other formatting--you've got to take a look! True, the basic HTML I worked on didn't do the trick (I found a Java programming website by 2 two excellent authors who provided the actual code which finally worked,) but at least I figured out how to add the Java code in precisely in the right spots!

I'm so pleased; now I will put up the next several book reviews I've been drafting...but the real victory is to just have my reviews--my pages--as I imagined them!