10 Jul 2022 - Jake Millhiser
Youtube tutorials suck. At least when it comes to trying to learn something which has a large audience of interest (web development). Since there is no short of people who do web development, YouTube is overflooded with low-quality tutorials. It seems that most people struggle to give tutorials that actually address what the viewer is actually trying to learn, but rather provide superflous/superficial information.
My example is learning how to create navigation bars (navbars) for websites.
Every YouTube tutorial about creating navbars advertises that they’re “awesome, super-dynamic navbars!” to lure you in with eye candy. Yet by the end of the video, while they wasted time making the navbar look nice, it isn’t functional for actually nagivating your web pages.
Seriously, right now go to youtube and search “how to create navbar”, and see how many videos actually show you how to make a functional navbar. So many are just filled with non-sense asthetic changes that I can do myself after I get it working. What I need to actually get the navbar working first. For example, they never actually get into how actually change the “active” element of the navbar, or how to nagivate to different web pages, or any other base required functionallity.
I am a website development noob. I realize that the “proper way” to do this isn’t to just copy paste this navbar onto every HTML page on my website and change the active list element. However, I would have assumed that a tutorial on navbars would include this information, as the first thing I would want to do with a navbar is to use them to navigate.
Thus instead of using just pure HTML,CSS, I used Jekyll as it provides a manner of including conditional statements within HTML. Perhaps there is a better way to do this, which I will use once I figure it out.
Here is a link to Jekyll