I am revisiting a site I made a long time ago. It’s got a huge list of lectures for chapters which must be kept in order if it is to make sense.
The list I have works great, sorts perfectly, keeps order and I kept adding to it, but after a certain point the list refuses to stay in the order used in the HTML. I keep getting told it’s an issue with the CSS or Javascript.
I’m OLD and took a lot of time off coding sites. I missed the whole introduction of CSS and never learned Javascript. I found a few helpful hints, but they were all just code snippets which I hate to admit, I am clueless to know where to put. I am not even sure if these snippets are to replace existing code in their respective css/js files or just be added to them (and if added, does it matter where?). I can look at HTML code and figure out how to modify it, but css and javascript are a bit cryptic to my Old Hippy brain.
My experiments yielded no progress, so am hoping someone here can help.
I miss the simplicity of the old ways of coding sites…
I have finally broken down and asked an AI to help because, due to my ignorance of modern scripting I used a template for this. I only wanted one page from a many page template and it references the css/js for every page in it’s index so it’s tough to even know exactly which file to edit and it gets frustrating.
Popped back in here to check for replies while it’s “thinking” (I am still getting over an aversion to using such tools at all due to that Old Hippy mentality not liking the environmental impact of their data centers) (topic for elsewhere I guess).
It’s a bible study site and my client rightfully wants the thing to keep it’s order so it matches the source material.
If you want to see the mess I’m dealing with I may need to message you because I seem to be blocked from posting a link
Any tips would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for offering.
This thread is no longer needed. I hate AI. I hate that this thread is not the place for that discussion. And most of all - I hate that it works. The consequences of that will be being discussed quite a lot and in quite a lot of places for quite a long time.
If anyone cares, or decides to try ai for coding sites, here’s how it went:
I searched for and found several ai sites claiming they build html/css/js sites. Tried a few but all made very poor products. Some features worked but others were left out entirely despite being in the prompt (and more than one site wanted money to refine it further!),
I saw a thread here that said “claude” was good for coding, so went and asked it to help me find what was wrong with my code. It explained things and offered code snippets and I kept pestering it about where they go. It was having me search for various things in the css and it got so annoying I just sent it a link to the broken page asked it where I could find a good ai to build an empty template with similar functionality that I can just populate by hand. The code I was working with was a mess (not all my code).
Don’t you know it spat out a working copy with all the content already placed!
AI is fascinating and a bit scary. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, released an article the other day saying Claude will soon be on the verge of making recursive self-improvements. In other words, looking a few months down the road, Claude will be able to identify its own inadequacies and fix them without direct human intervention. This will, in essence, create a feedback loop of increasingly intelligent AI that continuously creates more intelligent versions of itself, and so on.
Anthropic is apparently concerned that this AI tipping point will cause societal disruption and is warning that we’re not ready for it. I’ve read estimates that it could replace 50% of all jobs within just a few years.
It was simple (HTML 4) and now with so many things (CCS3, Html5, and Javascript) then it has become more complicated but more interactive and more support for video formats and animations. We don´t need a¨Flash”plugin anymore. And Html 5 added something more useful that having a "flash” plugin installed all the time and Animatons are included in Html 5 and CCS 3
I may have ruined my career over AI. I’m a Chemist. I was Lab Manager for 30 years at a small chemical manufacturing plant that got bought by a giant monster that promptly dismissed much of the long tenured staff.
I haven’t interviewed in 30 years and refused to engage with AI recruiters emailing me saying to CALL their AI chatbot to take the next steps. I replied never to have an AI be involved in the 1st contact of hiring. It’s dehumanizing and I will not tolerate it. I accused them of exploiting the unemployed and desperate sector of the population to train their ai for free and asked how they’ll pay me to talk to it.
Never heard back and interview opportunities are scarce in manufacturing these days.
So I’m making websites.
AI didn’t take my job, but it’s costing me opportunities because my morals and ethics refuse to ever allow an AI to be my boss, manager or even recruiter. Let it forward my resume to a human and I’ll talk to them.
AI is a useful tool and a fun toy, but it is nowhere near ready to be making decisions about people’s lives and livelihoods.
