Feeding another addiction

OK, so I'm a domain-name addict. It won't be available for a day or two, but having thought of it in conjunction with my little home-schooling project, I just had to register hackwarts.com.

And in a pleasant change from the evil morass of internic/network solutions/verisign, GoDaddy has a nice, friendly user interface, low prices, and hosts your DNS for free (giving you full control over your MX, A, and CNAME records -- I didn't see TXT or AAAA, but I don't need them right now).

Nothing's impossible when you're 12 years old

...It's only when you get old and cynical that reality starts getting in the way.

First lessons

Well, Hackwarts School of Software Wizardry is sort-of online -- at least, it has a DNS entry that points to my box, even if I don't have a website there as yet. And I've given chaoswolf and super_star_girl their first lessons (separately, since they had to be pretty heavily customized for their respective ages and experience). Both girls now have a public_html/ directory (only visible inside the firewall -- sorry) and an index.html file that they made using Emacs.

I told them what to type; they typed. It's been over a decade since I tried what the Extreme Programming types call "pair programming", but it's still a good way to teach someone else's fingers. The Woof seemed to take to it right away -- she's been using HTML here on LJ for quite a while. After she satisfied herself that she understood HTML she asked "teach me programming". Not a project for an evening, but I pointed her to the Emacs scratch buffer and gave her a couple of lessons on Lisp data structures.

The YD was a bit more tentative, but wanted me to show her how to download and link in an image. She's used Google Images at school, so she just needed me to show her where to download to and how to make an <img> tag.

Fun.