A little Webmaker success story

Posted by: stak
Tags: mozilla
Posted on: 2013-10-12 15:51:23

My girlfriend was writing a blog post and wanted to put some tables in. Unfortunately the Wordpress interface wasn't being very helpful with adding tables so she took a PNG screenshot of the tables in Word and inserted those in. While the solution worked fine for her, I was aware that turning text into images is generally not a great solution for the web, for a number of reasons (bad for accessibility, less dynamic layout, slower page load, etc.).

I realized this was a perfect opportunity for a little webmaking experience. I fired up Thimble on my laptop, and with her looking over my shoulder, created a simple two-row table with the style she wanted, showing her some of the different style attributes that could be used. Once I had the start of her table, I published it as a "make". She was then able to view it on her laptop and remix it, putting in the rest of the data she wanted. She also created a second table (complete with bullet points and red text), and pasted the HTML back into the Wordpress HTML editor.

I think the part I like best about tools like Thimble are that they are very low-overhead to use. You don't need to sign in to start using it, and the interface is simple and obvious. For publishing the make, I did have to sign in, but with Persona, so I didn't have to create a new password for it. (If it required creating a more heavyweight account I would have just copied the HTML into pastebin or something, which is not nearly as cool.) And of course, the live preview of the HTML in Thimble is pretty neat too :)

Oh, and you should definitely read her blog post: Get Moving!

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