First, the ballet:

Today, I finally got back to class. I was again assisting in Friday class, and we had one brand-new student. He let us know that he was uncomfortable with any kind of hands-on correction, so I spent much of the class contemplating best practices for verbally imparting elements of basic placement and so forth that are easiest to demonstrate by physically placing someone’s arms or what have you.

I’ll be thinking about this for quite a while, I suspect.

In other news, I’m building a PHP-driven contact form for Denis’ website, and being as my PHP skillz are more than tad rusty, I decided to play it safe and hunt up a tutorial (especially since I’ve never hand-coded PHP into a WordPress-driven site before).

I found a great one — it’s going gangbusters, thus far, so unless I hose something up (in which case I’ll just say, “Screw this,” and copy the code from the thoughtfully-provided repository ;)), I think it’ll work.

The best part is that it’s well-written: clear, concise, and direct.

Here’s a link, if you’re into this kind of stuff:

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-build-your-own-wordpress-contact-form-and-why/

I initially started doing this the e my WP install is wonky and I can’t actually install plugins, but since I prefer actually doing many things by hand, this appeals to my  crankety old-fashioned tastes.

I cut my teeth on old-skool HTML as a kid before WYSIWIG editors were really a thing (and definitely before good ones that didn’t produce code that looked like something a cat might disgorge after a hard night on the town), and developed my initial abilities the same way everyone did back then, through the magic of View Source. This fostered in me a deep appreciation for clean, well-commented code, and the tutorial above is a fantastic example of what that should look like.

For maximum laziness irony, of course, I am writing this entry in the WP’s “Visual” editor.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Oh, or, well — I have a research idea percolating for my ballet peeps, but I’ll get to that in another post. This is mostly a reminder to myself, so there we go. STICKY NOTE!!!!

À bientôt, mes amis!