For about the last year I have been studying OOP programming among other things. I can’t remember the last time I looked at an xHTML or CSS book. I have decided to go back through and brush on my CSS skills. I find myself writing PHP more than anything these days. I do like coding, but I like to able to put a pretty face on my scripts. I have seen to many scripts with bad layouts and hard to navigate admin areas and I don’t want to be in that category. So, for the next month I have decided to study CSS and Photoshop. I am a big fan of the Lynda.com training videos. I have even started to make some of my own on PHP. The videos aren’t cheap, but are definitely worth their wight. I think there is something like 4 training courses on Photoshop. I have been through the basic one and learned a lot from it. With CS3 out now there is a whole new set for me to watch. From basic to advanced 3D capabilites I can’t wait to have those skills in my toolbox. I would say as of now I am pretty decent at CSS but I am sure there are some better techniques I could be using. So the majority of my time will be spent on Photoshop.

As for HTML there really isn’t much for me to learn, so that will be a quick look through just to make sure I am fallowing all the xHTML rules.  I have noticed more and more people asking me if my plugins fallow xHTML guidlines and my answer is hmmmm. I think so. I never really checked, but from now on I will. I think it would be better if the browsers would throw an error if you code is messed up instead of trying to figure out what you were trying to do. That way you would get better results across the board by having flawless code. I don’t know of any other languages that are okay with missing and wrong syntax so why shouldn’t html be the same.

Well it never hurts to take a step back and go through the basics. I think that is true for any skill.