Tutorial Hell and Coding Research Rant
I am taking a pause to step back and assess the various coding technologies that I am studying and/or working to implement in my development projects.
These projects can be categorized as being one of WordPress, Eleventy, JavaScript, or CSS.
Really what this is about is being frustrated when seemingly simple things don't work. My head hurts and I need a time out.
WordPress has completely changed over the last five years. Recently I built a custom theme for a client using the newish block system. I did a lot of research to get through it.
The code generated in the WordPress block system is ugly and hacky. I have questions that I'd like to ask. The thing where I'm stuck though is implementing Contact-Form-7 which is an old plugin technology.
I'm gone over and over it and studied multiple tutorials. I'm sure I am missing something simple. I just can't get it to work. Close but no cigar.
Around Eleventy, I am currently blinging out my Eleventy blog and I have become stuck around getting Eleventy to output the right date on my posts. The Eleventy documentation states that this is a "Common Pitfall" but it does not offer a clear solution.
I currently have over 40 browser tabs open looking for how I can fix this simple problem. There is a suggested work-around in the documentation but it does do what I need. It uses a template tag. The code clip does fix the date, but the format is butt-ugly. Adding a filter to format the code breaks. I either have the date correct or the date format. I cannot find how to do both.
What I need is to fix the date in the .eleventy.js script and format the output there, rather than in a template tag. I've circled around and around in the sparsely written Eleventy documentation looking for what should be a one-line of code answer.
I want to say "fuck you" about both of these problems.
I am also studying CSS and JavaScript on the side. I am building CSS patterns for components that I can use. There are a lot of new CSS declarations to embrace. I also need to repeatedly review code patterns for flexbox and grid. The syntax for both are so complicated and varied that it is hard to remember.
I have another project that requires JavaScript and iterating through arrays of data. I need this project to help me to choose colors for my projects. Learning the JavaScript that I need takes a lot of time, trial and error.
So that is my rant. The thing to do is to take breaks and step away. It all comes eventually. Sometimes solutions drop unexpectedly and if I am persistent and let it happen, it will.