I don’t think I have written more than 20 lines of computer code since college — until yesterday.

My site uses PHP heavily and I decided that to really make it work like I envisioned I needed to learn to bend the code to meet my demands. I have written programs in Java, C++, Scheme, and Visual Basic so I figured PHP wouldn’t be that difficult to pickup. I like learning hands-on so I downloaded my site files to my home computer and started hacking away. If I didn’t know what a particular line of code did I would comment it out, load the page, view the results, then adjust from there.

I ended up spending 8 hours coding and recoding. It got quite messy a few times (thank God for backups) but in the end I accomplished my goal: Optimize, Optimize, Optimize.

This is what I learned:

Programs with WYSIWYG editors are good for basic sites, beginners, or getting something up on the web fast. The problem with them is that they often add extraneous code that ends up slowing your site down. The results might look pretty but you may be paying for your eye-candy in the form of bandwidth. For the best results I found that using a text-only editor optimized for HTML, PHP, XHTML, and CSS worked best. Only then could I get down to the nitty-gritty and make everything work exactly as I wanted. I also learned that picking up a new programming syntax after 8 years of almost no coding can be likened to riding a bike: It may take a little bit of practice, but after a few tries you will be riding like when you were a kid.

Read my next post for a review of my favorite text-only editors.

Filed under: Tech