DirkTheWebPhoenix

Nice to come across another Web Phoenix from the nineties trying to raise from his or her ashes. Ah the nostalgia of table designs and even spacer gifs... As for more powerful HTML editors than plain text editors, I really liked HomeSite (with tag completion and powerful linting) and Symantec Visual Page (WYSIWYG with fairly clean code and awesome table creation)... And not to forget framesets (abolished over SEO issues, apparently)... And the Internet was still an information highway letting anyone publish free speech, as opposed to a commercial market... Ah, the golden age... Anyway... ___Flat Files___ Flat files with PHP may not be recommendable. I experimented with that some 10 years ago (hobbywise, my career had been ended by the dot com debacle)... with PHP 4, me thinks, and I discovered that I could only append to it but not edit records except by doing it all in memory and ovewriting the whole file. And then there were file privilege issues possibly giving hackers more access than my own PHP scripts. *sigh* So, cumbersome as dealing with a MySQL database or similar is, it seems the better choice for me unless PHP's file management has improved a lot (which I rather doubt). But other community members with more recent experience may be able to correct me. ___Grids and Flexbox___ They are modern CSS features I have so far avoided in direct website design (despite liking them) because I worry that there might still be too many browsers out there that can't handle them. (I have also avoided floating because of problems it can cause.) And so far I have been able to do pretty well with inline-block designs. But maybe I am really too overcautious here? Well, let's hope we get to resurrect. :-) Dirk

Hello present-day gurus and fellow starters. This is my first post on killersites.com. I am trying this place because Stefan Mischook is my favorite youtuber on webdev/webdesign issues (and he also in other ways feels like a kind of soulmate). I know this forum's site went through a pause and might not be back up in terms of activity that could help me, but I'm giving it a try. I am an ancient web developer from the nineties, now trying to resurrect that career and an income. After familiarizing myself with modern HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design (and getting a little back into JS and PHP (the latter I played with a few years ago)), I have picked WordPress as a next-step specialization to pursue in order to allow me to work as a self-employed lone wolf when I may turn out too old to be hired. I just finished a course in which I built a demo WP site as a course project. What I could really use right now would be a suitable website builder community to discuss design and programming issues as they come up. I could also use some tips on (ideally free) hosting services where I could post my current WordPress demo site to show it to potential employers or clients (while I am still strapped for money). Obviously, my demo site has almost no traffic and a storage size under 200 MB; but I have run into a big hurdle with hosting services. I don't necessarily trust all paid-only ones just because they collect money, and those two free accounts that I already tried have had too many issues: snail speed, blocked PHP "mail ()" disabling the Contact Form, blocked *.zip files (stopping the Duplicator plugin, but luckily I could PHP-hack my way around this), blocked UpdraftPlus plugin... These hosting servers were warmly recommended by online articles that were either too superficial or too burdened with a hidden conflict of interests (earning commissions or fees from the hosting services they recommend). I will also need a place where to stage future projects while I build them, btw. Any suggestions welcome. Digging through posts in this community, I came across a suggestion of xyz, but the post was from 2010 (https://www.killersites.com/community/index.php?/topic/3973-free-hosting/&do=findComment&comment=20670). Thanks for any advice or tip on anything I mentioned. :-) :-) Dirk