If you wish to learn enough to chatter about national politics at a cocktail party, watch the television pundits and read the newspapers. But you will be limited to sharing only your ideas about others’ presentation of the matter truly at hand. If you wish to learn enough to share new information regarding national politics, then go to the source: watch hearings’ webcasts offered through the committees’ webpages, watch C-Span coverage of floor debates, and head to Thomas to read transcripts of debates and of the bills themselves. You may be surprised to find how often nobody else in the entire country sees or hears or notices what you do.
If you wish to write about what you’ve learned, go ahead and use blogging software or html; I certainly do. But you will be limited in what you can share. The more you see, the more you may find yourself frustrated by the incapacity of your fingers to keep up with the demands of your mind to share information — either in the organization of that information for presentation or in the writing of that information on a web page. When an event is massive in its detail or massive in the number of people involved in bringing it about, there are times that your typing fingers can’t possibly keep up with it all. If you wish to share more volumes of information more quickly than your fingers can manage unaided, consider going deeper into the technology of writing. PHP, is a Pre-Hypertext Processor, a programming language that sets the conditions and rules by which the sharing of written information can occur. PHP is both a tool for building understanding through the analysis of large amounts of existing information and a tool for the coherent distribution large volumes of what you’ve learned through clear and meaningful programs that write for you.
Don’t just act as a tube carrying prepackaged liquid information slop from one location to another. Make yourself a source. Make a habit out of C-Span and Thomas. Learn PHP. Then try putting them together to generate new knowledge and share it in detail.
This new format makes reading almost impossible… Is this a site glich or is this a planned new format?
I sent a screen shot of what it looks like on my end…
Hendrix, thanks for the kind words. I agree with you that one of the strengths of PHP is its flexibility and intuitive language; it’s almost like BASIC in that way.
Jacob, I’ve seen the image as you’ve got it, from which I see you’re looking at the page in an Internet Explorer browser. In my IE browser (the latest version) I can’t make it look like your screen capture. It looks like you’re running an older version of IE… and those older versions of IE are known to be a bit kooky in how they display pages. If you send me an e-mail telling me what version of IE you’ve got running, I can do my best to reproduce the problem and then fix it. But as it is, the layout works on my computer for the Chrome, Firefox and IE browsers, so I’m stymied about how to get your problem fixed.
Anybody else have visualization problems with the new format?
Update: just checked, and it looks right in the Safari browser as well.
The new layout looks fine to me; I’m using Firefox 3.
PHP is a handy language. I’ve used quite a few programming languages at home, school, and work, and I find PHP to be comparatively flexible (letting you apply as much structure as you care to without requiring it), portable, and forgiving for beginners to experiment with. It’s similar to perl with less esoteric syntax. Best of luck on your scripting projects Jim.