Prettyng it up

[004] ... [Internet], [Life]

Twenty years back I bought my first PC with better-specs (for that time) for my office to handle some expected projects on the anvil. The previous one at home was an used i386 with a whopping 128MB disk and probably 4MB RAM and a tiny B/W monitor gifted to my father that suited DOS-based word processing and such, with Windows 3.1 as a dual boot needing to enter WIN to get-in, but served great with both 4 and 5.25 inch floppy drives to back-up!

Unfortunately those projects didn't materialize for odd reasons, and with the ongoing having almost come to an end, the device tended to look a wasted investment during the long period of professional inactivity. But not being one to get deterred (having gone through such phases earlier), I got into computing, learning it quick. Internet connection came a little later, but being a modem-based routed through the phone line, things were quite expensive that allowed not more than an hour distributed through day!

Internet was exciting, and I got drawn to webpages, wondering how they got created - all those colors, images, formatted text, blue-underlined text (sometimes images) that took you to other pages or somewhere within the page when clicked, the scrolling text and such looked magical. One day while working on a document I observed the Save as Webpage option and that was the beginning. Though it yielded required results, after a bit of R&D and discovering View source through right-click on a page, I came to know of HTML coding and got hooked. Started initially using a tiny editor and having got familiarized moved over to Notepad that was more satisfying. And to put to use the newly acquired knowledge I dabbled in creating a monthly newsletter, calling it Interface (a catchy term for someone bitten by the tech-bug!), pulling in interesting news from various sources, trying various layouts each time, and mailed them to friends and family. Those had errors no doubt, when it came to displaying images at the other end, which never got shown for anyone except me since they all pointed to the locally stored! Not being aware of needing to have a source on the cloud to store and display them anywhere, the format quietly moved onto PDF with embedded images! It may have lasted for five years, and I put an end once RSS and better forms of curated news came into vouge on the Net.

To cut the story short (after having gone back to my roots, but yet continuing with HTML as a hobby), I was wondering of a way to display these posts with formatted text than just looking a plain-Jane, and the first thing that came to mind is what many messaging apps support these days, that of enclosing words with underscores or asterisks and such that change the look, and it worked. Looking up for Markdown codes, it was easy to learn some basics, and I selectively pepped-up the previous posts and made links clickable than display full URL adjacently etc. and am tempted to try adding images if possible...