Don't understand GitHub—ready to give up

Definitely will do this tomorrow. Thanks so much!

Hi again, everyone~

I had to step away for a few days to do some work (the paying kind), and I was surprised to find seven new replies to this topic yesterday. I can’t tell you how humbling and heartening and reassuring it is to receive all this support! Posters like @jerriais and @monotone2k have gone out of their way to make me feel like I can do this. I’ve been attending local tech Meetups, too, and the people there have been just as welcoming, not to mention smart and interesting.

Now I’m back in GitHub, and I have a workable blog format—feel free to take a look). (And if anyone knows why my profile block won’t float at the top right, please enlighten me!) My blog content is still in a Word doc, but I have >45 days’ worth of entries to load. I ended up using GitHub and the command line only. The other interfaces I tried just seemed to add an extra layer of complexity. I did go through all the tutorials except the one suggested yesterday by @Jamesfh. I’ll do that one next—it looks really helpful.

I know I’m doing some things wrong, such as committing too often and reviewing my own pull requests (like proofreading my own writing, right?), but it’s a small victory just to get something on the screen. This little GitHub detour has also been good practice with HTML and CSS. That might make things easier when I return to the Javascript certificate.

This topic has received >600 views already, so no doubt the resources suggested here will benefit many newbies like me in the future!

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I’ve been practicing with the command line, but these commands are new to me. I’ll play around with them. Thank you!

Thanks for the links. The tip about giving your branches descriptive names is really important.

I’m glad to have helped. And if you’re attending Meetups, you’re already braver than I am! I’m more of a solo learner, and shy away from group events because I’m worried I’ll be at the stupid end of the spectrum :smiley:

Regarding your right hand side block: you’ve correctly set it to float right, which it’s doing already, albeit beneath the other blocks. This is because to get them alongside each other, you also need to tell the left hand side stuff to float left.

The best analogy I’ve ever seen for learning to use floats correctly is elevators. It seemed so obvious to me after reading that.

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At first I had to make myself go to the Meetups, but they’re becoming fun as I get to know other members. Tech people have such interesting jobs and quirky hobbies…

I’ve tried everything I can think of to correct my float, but the right elevator refuses to service the top floor! Any ideas?

I’ve looked over your code and you should only need to change the ordering. If you’re writing the markup for the .rightcolumn last, it’s the last person on the elevator. Write it first, and it’ll be one of the people on the front row. Everything else should ‘just work’ at that point.

That makes sense logically, but I do have the rightcolumn class listed before the profilecard class. Were you looking at an earlier version? Here’s everything I can recall having tried, although I don’t claim to have done it correctly:

• Adding “float: clear” at the end of the left column content
• Wrapping the right column in a separate section
• Adding “float: right” to the column specs, the profilecard class specs, the div specs, and the section specs
• Adding “!important” after every “float: right.”
• Changing the max widths of the left- and right-column elements
• Reducing the size of the profile picture
• Setting the profilecard to “display: block”
• Setting the profilecard to “align: right”
• Setting the profilecard to “position: absolute”
• Removing “row” html [I’m not sure why I need to specify the “row” class, since there’s no corresponding css for “row,” but I tried removing it, and my profile block went away entirely. That’s especially strange because html for “row” applies to introcard and datecard but not to profilecard. You’d think removing it would cause the two cards it’s associated with to disappear, rather than the card it’s *not* associated with.]

I’ve spent hours reading about floats and trying different configurations—not a total loss, since trial and error = learning, but man, I’d like to find a solution! Thanks for your help.

I’ll clarify. You should move the actual HTML for the right hand side toward the top of the page. The order of the CSS isn’t important in this case :slight_smile:

Codepen for reference: https://codepen.io/monotone2k/pen/OwdXzW

Also, if you’re adding !important anywhere, you’re probably doing it wrong. When you have a chance, read up on ‘specificity’ in CSS. You should be structuring your style rules in a way that you’re in full control of how specific something is - and therefore which rule will win. Using !important is just admitting that you’re not in control :slight_smile:

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Haha! That made me laugh out loud because using “!important” was indeed a throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall kind of move. And when I read about specificity, I noticed that some of my classes should actually be IDs and so on (as I mentioned, every roadblock is a learning opportunity).

I’m sorry to be dense, but I do have rightcolumn before profilecard in both my css (I thought it didn’t matter there) and html. What else am I doing wrong or not getting?

Think of your page in terms of blocks (after all, who doesn’t love Lego?)

From top to bottom, you have:

A header block, which comes first.
On the right you want a block with your profile card.
On the left, two other blocks.

Your current HTML has the profile card block last - so it’s last on the elevator. Bump that block to the top (intact, so .profilecard is still inside of .rightcolumn in your HTML).

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Oh! I get it. Hot damn—it worked! THANK YOU! :grin:

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:slight_smile: CSS can’t do everything for you. It’s a powerful way of prettying up your skeleton, but the skeleton has to be the right shape first!

If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been working in front-end web development for 2 years now and still come across stuff I don’t know (almost every day…) :smiley:

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Not sure if that makes me feel better, but it doesn’t surprise me. At least it keeps things interesting! Thanks again.

Hello. i am now reading the Git documentation and it has become very clear to me why so many people are having problems. I hate to say this but it is very poorly written and is not at all suitable for beginners. That is just the truth and eventually when someone does write the documentation in plain logical english, I just do not think so many people will have all these problems.

for example this:

/etc/gitconfig file: Contains values applied to every user on the system and all their repositories. If you pass the option --system to git config , it reads and writes from this file specifically. (Because this is a system configuration file, you would need administrative or superuser privilege to make changes to it.)

So this is the first step? Haha! So I want to use /etc/gitconfig ? How does one "pass the option ‘–system’ to ‘git config’ then, specifically? A first time reader had to leave here and look for the answer to how to write the command elsewhere and here is where potentially more confusion sets in.

In my opinion it is not your fault at all for having problems.

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