Nonna x2 and Other Stuff
I became a Nonna for the second time last weekend.
Welcome Baby Jesse
My second grandson Jesse was born just before Halloween. He's doing well along with his mom and dad. My daughter and I were both hoping for a Halloween birthday, but it's close enough that she will use it as a theme for his parties each year.
Life in the Slow Lane
Not planning to overshare here, but I am temporarily disabled and awaiting surgery.
Six months ago when my cancer treatment ended I felt the best I have in a long time — I was doing cardio every day, bounding up and down the stairs to my condo, going on long shopping trips with my daughter.
Unfortunately my chemo treatments accelerated an arthritic condition (chemo sometimes does weird things to you besides blasting cancer). I'm now confined to a wheelchair and learning how to be a disabled person — a big topic for another post. Much of my daily routine involves navigating physical pain and limited mobility.
To be sure, this situation has caused me a lot of emotional pain as well. But I am counting my blessings. I work from home in a job that I love, my daughter has been helping me as much as she can, and my physical limitations have provided me with an opportunity to slow down and focus on some long-delayed goals.
Projects this Weekend
To that end, there are a couple projects I want to tackle this weekend (besides the usual household chores, which I'm getting pretty good at from a sitting position 
).
Too Many Options
First, there are so many different web technologies and so many directions I could go in with my skills, I sometimes get overwhelmed. And I think my blog posts will reflect that — I'm all over the place.
Take MkDocs dropdown menus, for example. I never did find a way to add drop-down functionality to the main nav. I don't know enough about MkDocs (or Jinja) template development, and I was not able to pick apart the Material theme enough to figure it out.
Then I thought maybe I should revisit OxygenXML and figure out how to customize templates so that we can do more with our help website. So now I'm on an XSLT kick, although I have not fully abandoned MkDocs just yet.
Revisiting OxygenXML
OxygenXML is an excellent tool for its purpose, which is to store documentation in raw markup (XML/DITA) and publish it in multiple formats (aka "write once, deploy anywhere").
The web publishing output, OxygenXML WebHelp, is only one small part of the tool's functionality. It is otherwise not meant to be a website builder like WordPress or static site generators.
Although you can customize the look and feel of WebHelp's built-in templates with CSS, you can't change the page layouts that way. The layouts are made up of XML-based components, and moving any component (e.g., the search bar) to another position on the page requires an XSL transformation.
So here are my two options, as I see it:
- Abandon OxygenXML altogether
- Learn XML/XSLT (and JSON) to harness more customizing power
I've decided to work on the latter this weekend. I stumbled on a Pluralsight course called "XSLT 2.0 and 1.0 Foundations" by Dimitre Novatchev, and he happens to use an older version of OxygenXML for demonstration. To prepare for this, I followed an introductory XML course on LinkedIn Learning by Joe Marini.
JQuery
Joe Marini also teaches a JQuery course on LinkedIn, which I started this week. I have attempted to learn Javascript many times over the years and I always get stopped in my tracks by any chapter on numbers. Math makes my eyes glaze over.
But JQuery is strictly for manipulating web pages and the DOM, and I "get" it in ways that I don't get Javascript per se. So I've been focusing on this as well as courses that devote entire sections to the DOM, like "JavaScript Essential Training" by Morten Rand-Hendricksen.
Time to Get Cracking!
My goal is to finish the XSLT, JQuery and Javascript courses this weekend.
Time to make coffee and some breakfast and get cracking.