These days internet domains are so inexpensive that 11-year-old kids can buy them with their allowance. Noah recently took the plunge. For the past month he's been busily teaching himself web-publishing, and has been pushing up against the limits of my ISP's web-hosting offerings. He also didn't like the fussy long URL he had to use to publicize his site.So for $77 a year he now owns NovaNoah.com and has a generous value-added web-hosting package to support it. This past weekend he spent hours transferring the two main divisions of his website over to the new host, tweaking all the links and media files, fleshing out some more pages, integrating it all with the look and feel of his blog, adding a home-website-menu HTML widget to his blog and adding a few new bells and whistles to his personal site.
I built my first website from scratch in about 1997. Noah would laugh if he could see what I put together as my first effort. I used a primitive gif and an imagemap for a menu. I don't think I figured out tables for formatting until I'd rebuilt the site a couple of times. He's been able to benefit here and there from my knowledge, but there's no doubt his climb up the learning curve has been far swifter and more natural than mine was. If any kid deserves a domain in which to exercise his web-publishing ability, it's this one.
That is awesome. Wish I had the funds to get Nikolaus started on something like that...might have him start playing with some of the freebie web page options though...he says that web design is part of his life goals, he really wants to be a game designer he says. He is 15 though. Kudos to Noah!!!!
ReplyDeleteLucy, you might look into your ISP's offerings. Where I live most standard $18/month internet access packages include a few MB of personal webpage space. Most people are totally unaware of this feature of their accounts.
ReplyDeleteHe appears to have mastered simple HTML. A next step could be to make a more dynamic site using ASP.NET and C#.
ReplyDeleteMS offers a free development environment called Visual Studio Express Located here.
Programming simple tasks such as responding to button clicks on the webpage could be a great introduction into programming in general, and move him one more step toward the world of games.
Visual studio?, i hear of that allot, i think we have the basic edition.
ReplyDeleteHi Miranda,
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine (shantz's wife, actually) showed my wife and I your blog. It's great!
On the web design front, you should also look at CSS. Most web designers are moving away from tables and gravitating towards CSS. It does a better job of separating website content from the layout and display. It also removes the need to use JavaScript to change button images and such. Here is a good site showing how to create unique menus with CSS. There are a lot of CSS resources out there on the web and it’s pretty easy to use.
Hey Noah,
ReplyDeleteVisual Studio is Microsoft's development environment. If you are doing development for windows, chances are you'll want to use visual studio. I would venture a guess that almost all game companies use visual studio to develop in. It used to be expensive (even for the educational version), but they've recently released a variety of different free flavors.
There is a web development version: Visual Web Developer.
And a version for more traditional windows development or game development: Visual C# Express.
I think the next version of DirectX (the graphics API windows game developers use) is going to be the Microsoft XNA Framework. I've messed around with XNA Game Studio Express and it's pretty nice. The 3D stuff can be confusing, but it always is, regardless of what language or graphics API you use. The 2D implementations are really slick though. I found a few tutorials that look pretty good here.
If you want to write a game, I would suggest starting with a really simple C# game like pong or tetris to get past the whole concept of setting up a game environment without having to worry about a complicated program. Plus once you have a nice 2D tetris game you can make it 3D without having to be an expert modeler. It's all just cubes. I started with a tetris game and it was really fun. Keep coding! :)
Wow cool, thanks for the info, I'll see about getting the visual web developer if my mom lets me :)
ReplyDeleteNoah, what a great website!
ReplyDeleteI think you might have a future in website development for technophobes like me! Congrats!
yeah, that might be a good idea, another thing that i might do is make music for games like mikko tarmia, my favorite composer, he is making the music for lugaru 2, lugaru is my favorite game so far, and i can't wait for the sequel.
ReplyDeleteNoah, would you like to connect with my boys???? They are a little older, but they may be able to help you find some of that music you want and maybe you can help Nikolaus. Ask mom, she can email me.....and I can give you their email addresses.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tips....I haven't had time to chat with Niko more on whether he wants to design a site but I am sure he would like to.
Probably a good Scout project for him even...I am sure there is a badge for that.