Javascript Shorthand Method Usage

Hello, everybody;

This is not entirely new information, however, it was new to myself and many others. I recently discovered that in JavaScript, one can call methods on items from the DOM without first declaring them as a variable with the standard

'var varName = document.getElementById("someElement");'

.

For example assuming you had a paragraph tag with the id of 'someElement', the following JavaScript code:

someElement.innerHTML="I am some new text";

Accomplishes the same result as:

var someElement = document.getElementById("someElement");
someElement.innerHTML="I am some new text";

However, as with many things, just because it works doesn't mean it should be done. The small amount of information I was able to acquire about this strange occurrence stated that it is bad practice, and should be avoided, and relying on the browser to create your variables is never a good idea. I have verified that this works on Internet Explorer and Chrome, but have not checked Firefox/Safari/Opera etc.

So don't try this at home, folks. (Or do; just not in a live/professional setting)

My Plans for This Blog

Hello to everyone who may be reading this! What I plan to use this blog for is checking out new web technologies as giving my opinion on its strengths, weaknesses, and so on. In a way, it is as much of a sly way to motivate myself to investigate these budding technologies as it is to share my thoughts about them.

I have recently been overloaded with course work, primarily because I let myself get a bit behind in my textbook in one of my courses. Because of this, as well as other life changes, I have not actually had time to relax and read my library books ("Ajax Bible" by Steven Holzner, and "PHP & MySQL: The Missing Manual" by Brett McLaughlin), let alone come on here to post. On top of everything, I was recently hired as a web development intern, which is exciting, but also sure to be time consuming. All in all I am stoked to begin work there, though.

I will be attending Inter-Op 2014 during the first week of April, and I am sure I will have plenty to report about after having attended that.

Due to all of this, I hate to disappoint anyone, but this blog is still not quite officially 'started'. However, I will do my best to check out at least one technology the next time I have a chance!

Please bear with me and stay tuned! I hope to have plenty of interesting things to see here soon.

Starting Things Off...

Hello, and welcome to anyone who may be reading this. You might be here because you are interested in the same things I am, or you may be here because you randomly stumbled across this blog while browsing the depths of the net. Regardless of how you landed in this particular part of the internet; Welcome!

I suppose I should begin with a little bit of background about myself. I am an aspiring web developer with my sights set on doing freelance web programming jobs for clients. I have been working with languages such as PHP and JavaScript for roughly 2 years now, and I enjoy it to a great degree. I used to have a web site (one of those free sites you get from your ISP, hah) and write some blog content when I was a youngster. None of that ever got anywhere and it lacked any sort of visual or functional spark that would draw anyone in. I would mostly just go on sites to get free JavaScript snippets and paste them into my site to see what would happen.

Fast forward by a little less than a decade, and I had forgotten I even enjoyed web things. I went into college with no particular direction, knowing only that I didn't want to live the rest of my life on minimum wage. I took a music class my first semester, thinking that I wanted to be a music producer, but ended up not enjoying it at all. Next semester, I took a few classes in the Graphics program, because I thought I wanted to be a 3D Artist. Long story short; I didn't want to be one after all.

However, one of the requirements to become a 3D Artist was a Web Design class, which I soon discovered that I had an actual interest in, and now here I am today. I spend a good part of my spare time learning and expanding my knowledge with these programming languages and techniques, and when I run into a problem, I gravitate toward writing a program to accomplish the task. I consider PHP to be my "language of choice", because that is what I would call the first real programming language I learned; after HTML and CSS of course, but those are required to do anything on the web anyway, so I don't count them in this situation. 

But anyway, this has gone on long enough. I hope that this blog can get off the ground, or at least function as a place where I can keep a running log of things that I learn, or technologies I find interesting, and so on. 

After writing that out, I am actually quite curious to hear how other folks in the industry found out that they were interested in working with web. Regardless of if it is web programming, or design or UX, or anything else, I would love to hear it. 

Even if you are not interested in any of this stuff, and you somehow stumbled upon this by accident, I would love to hear how you got your start in whatever it is that you do!