So part of the learning experience, as I as a newbie grow to learn more about coding and web development, is the collection of silly things I mistakenly do as I am trying to accomplish a task. Rather than feel embarrassed about them, I want to learn from them and even have a good chuckle over them. Once I do solve the problem, that is – it’s not as much fun when you still haven’t figured out where you made the mistake.
So here goes, some good geeky bloopers – and I welcome readers to submit their own in comments (preferably mistakes you made because you were inexperienced and that were easily fixed, once you found out how):
- php-ini – if anyone has had to install PHP on their machine, you will know what I’m talking about. My problem was I would call up the php info document and it told me I was running a previous version than the one I had installed. Took forever but we finally figured out I had a single outdated php.ini left over in my Apache folder which the web server was reading – I should have put the php.ini in my PHP folder, not my Apache folder. Oops.
- Capital letters – capital letters screw me up sometimes. I had a jpeg image with the file extension in all caps, so the server couldn’t find the image. I kept re-checking the spelling and finally it dawned on me the server was case-sensitive. You don’t need to learn that one twice!
- Uploading via FTP – had to figure out that the port number really does matter when I first started uploading files to my website via FTP
Then there are bloopers using software – way easier to think of these because they affect how I interact with others:
- Operator 11 – spent 20 minutes talking to myself thinking I was live on the air because I didn’t realize I had to press the Netcast button
- WordPress – sent out e-mails to a bunch of people to read a post I had written but had forgotten to publish – they kept getting Not Found errors trying to access the link I posted to the page
- Skype – tried to host a video conference call with multiple people, it was kind of a disaster because I kept inadvertently putting people on hold, not realizing that Skype doesn’t allow multi-user video conference calls
These are just the few I can think of off the top of my head, but I’m sure there have been many more. All part of the newbie experience 🙂