I’ve dealt with a mix of many different types of technologies in the process of building up this site: firebug, ssh/sftp, perl, HTML, DOM, css, javascript, Drupal, XeLaTeX, PHP, MySQL, akismet, and most recently jquery. Of course, the technology itself isn’t really that important compared to a solid understanding of core programming concepts (especially in procedure and functional languages) and basic networking concepts such as IP and nameservers. Lucky for me, I’ve had 4 years of college learning this stuff and 6 years of professional web development experience. But what if I knew nothing about computers and I wanted to build a site about learning Japanese on the internet? I would be stuck with some platform such as wikibooks or wordpress.com where I would lose a lot of control both in terms of my data and how it’s presented.
Considering how important the internet is becoming to our daily lives, don’t you think it’s ridiculous that I have to pay every year for my domain name and mostly likely for hosting if it wasn’t for ibiblio.org just to have my own website? I also think programming skills are becoming just as important as basic math and writing skills and should be part of every kid’s curriculum. What do you think?