Why Dreamweaver and my Journey to Wealthy Affiliate

byKeithBunge

227 followers

Updated 10 years ago

In looking at different WYSIWYG’s I was investigating free programs for content creation. I was exposed to the 3 main content creation systems. These content creation systems were Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress.

The most popular of these web content creation systems is by far and away the Wordpress blogging software that is now being used for simple web site creation by many businesses.

To create a true website with maximum potential for expanding of both content and access to a true data base you need a web site based on HTML and CSS. For it to be delivered faster the solution is Wordpress as it is written in PHP and saves your pages as an item within SQL server and pulls them up once called or clicked on. This allows you a very fast website with almost instant retrieval.

Wordpress is a content creation system accessed through a dashboard. This allows you to do all your content creation and adding of images and links through this dashboard which automatically writes the simple HTML code for you. IF you use this through a hosting solution it is already set up for you. This means all you need to do is simply put the information in and use the tools on the dashboard to format the web site.
Joomla is the next step up from Wordpress. It allows for a little more flexibility and formatting options but you need a little more in depth knowledge of CSS and HTML. For a large project the content creation system of choice is Drupal. Although it is substantially more complicated and it requires a lot more knowledge of HTML and CSS it can build a site with a large SQL database and give a much more complicated and robust website. This is what a lot of large corporations and businesses choose unless they have a complete team of developers to do everything using hard coding. Eventhough some web masters may choose to use Drupal they always go back through the coding and check it with normally multiple people or teams.

Now I finally come to Dreamweaver. This is a solution that I could not and would not choose if I had to do it as a subscription based solution. This is simply a matter of economics for me. I do not have the extra $20 a month it now costs to access this software through the Cloud. But I did buy a copy of Dreamweaver when I was in school taking computer programming.

I bought it and did not activate it until 2015 and I got out of school in 2011. This software is a product of Adobe. They no longer sell the software. But they host it in the Cloud for a monthly fee. This software requires knowledge of much more than any of the content creation systems. However it does do the same thing as the content creation systems. It writes HTML automatically. It writes CSS automatically. It writes PHP automatically. You can also create in Dreamweaver using Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. However Dreamweaver needs an apache web server to work through or with. I know this to be true of Wordpress but I have never used Joomla or Drupal. But it is necessary for Dreamweaver to render the product correctly. You can choose from multiple platforms to view the product in. You can use Internet explorer, Google Chrome, or even Safari to see the Mac results. Strangely enough not all internet platforms or browsers show the same results from the same programming. So this is a tool to make sure that all platforms see your end product in an attractive format. Or you have to make an if- then loop to use different programming for different browsers.

It is much more complicated to learn Dreamweaver than any of the content creation systems. But the end result is a professional website with you in charge of actually everything. You can still use the plug ins since someone has made them available to you in an open source language. So you can count on the goodwill of people worldwide who have faced the same challenges you face in getting an interactive website up and running. This leads to a place where I think the entire world is going: sharing and Unity Consciousness. Instead of charging your fellow man for all your efforts you are doing it once and not making it hard for the next person to follow and use your work. A spirit of cooperation and helping is what the world needs. This is in everything not just in open source programming.

So if you choose to use Dreamweaver you must learn all the languages that you are implementing. The reason for this is that if you understand the language even if you are like most US citizens and are lazy, like me, you want a machine to do the majority of the work for you. But what happens if it does not work? What if you think you are doing it right and the result is not the result you sought? Then you have the option of going in and hard coding the part that the WYSIWYG got wrong. It did not get it wrong, but it was not what you wanted because you do not know how to tell it specifically how to get to the logic you are trying to use.

So here is where you need to know how to do it by hand. Or that is you need to hard code the programming to get the results you want. It still saved you an immense amount of time over doing all the hard coding yourself. That is unless you think and write in coding which some do, but there are very few who do this. Coding is not hard but it is like learning another language. This may seem strange but in my sought for degree at Clover Park part of the requirements was to learn sign language. Or signing for the deaf was a requirement to get a degree in programming. This was because the more fluent you were or learned to think in other languages the better programmer you became.

I went to school to learn one thing. This was to program in metatrader language. Now this is becoming one of the official programming languages in the professional trading community. Specifically the Forex market, which is the largest market in the world. If you put the US Stock exchange, both the American stock exchange and the NASDAQ and all the derivatives markets in the United States along with the commodities market together it would not equal a pimple on the hind end of this market. There are no places to learn this or take this as a course that I know of. There is one programmer who has written two books on the subject but other than that there is nothing.

I could not take the course on metatrader since it did not exist. At least not within where I could access it. So I went to school and learned multiple programming languages. I learned Visual Basic which is a simple programming language. I then was able to qualify to take Java. This was much harder as it is an object oriented programming language. I took two semesters of this as I needed much more knowledge to transfer to what I really wanted to know and use. I also learned sign language. After school was done or I could no longer afford to pay my tuition, which was the same thing, I then went on to learn C++. This was because most of metatrader was taken from this language. There are multiple sources to learn this from online material and books. But you needed the foundation of the rules for any programming language. Once you learned this more than 75% of the mistakes I had made in trying to learn metatrader with no formal training were no longer a barrier.

I came to Wealthy Affiliate as a result of failing at a 10 year effort to conquer the market. I had programmed a lot of EA’s or trading robots and had been having some success in the market. But an event happened when I happened to be up trading the market manually. If you are not successful with a manual strategy you can never program a strategy to be done automatically. It was late at night for me when the event happened. The Swiss bank made an announcement. I caused such a large movement in the market that it bankrupted one of the largest Forex brokers in the United States. The Swiss Franc moved over 1800 pips in less than a minute. This US platform was FXCM. They lost so much money that night that they became insolvent. So I do not feel so bad losing the amount of money I had but it still hurt. They were bailed out with a very large loan but I came to the conclusion that I did not have the resources to keep funding what could be an instant and complete loss of funds.

So I learned what most high school students now learned in my basic HTML and CSS programming class. But I graduated high school in 1970 and the first affordable computer was not available until approximately 1985. When I took my first programming class it was in 1972 at PLU. At that time because of the large size of a computer it took up an entire floor of the library building and had to be kept in air conditioning to function. The language I learned was fortran which was a mathematical programming language used mostly for scientists. So it was a math class. So the background I had was in a language that used common practices that made infinite loops from certain GO TO calls that were not easy to find or fix. To submit a program you had to arrange time on a data punch machine and put all the break cards into the stack and hope you did not have one card out of order. You had to wait 3 days to a week for them to run your program. Since I learned this language a lot of the language rules have either been changed or done away with as bad practices within programming languages. So I had a background but one that was so out of date that it was actually bad information. I came from here to learn metatrader.

So I learned HTML and CSS when I had no interest in learning it. But it comes in handy right now while trying to learn what is going on in Word press. I wish I had taken PHP because this is going to be a challenge.

So in the long run this is why I choose to learn to use the Dreamweaver platform. I will learn how to use HTML, CSS and PHP really well by the time I go through the training. I bought the training book while still in college. It is about 500 pages long of mostly technical information about how to use Dreamweaver. It also has a CD with files and images and links to show you how to build a website. I am stalled right now as I am unable to install several things. First I am unable to install FileZilla as Norton considers this a bad program and takes it out as fast as I install it. I think that Norton is blocking me from installing a WAMP which is a word based apache server which I need to work in Word press and use Dreamweaver. I have it installed and on my computer but when I pull it up or activate it the program crashes and does not run.

So this takes me to the next thing that this is forcing me to learn. This is Linux. I can put an Apache server into this by booting my computer up through a flash drive and use Ubuntu or one of the other 2 Linux platforms that I put on a flash drive and learn to use an entirely new and much more secure operating system. This way I can bypass Norton. I can also access any program on my computer even from another operating system like Windows 7 which I am now using. But I am not sure how to do this even though I know it is possible. I have just enough knowledge to either be dangerous or possibly frustrated to no end. But everything is a journey and since this is the journey I chose, My Free Will, I must do it in the most professional manner I can. The I Ching says “Perseverance furthers.”