Turdy Tutorials and InstantRock.com
I first discovered InstantRock.com through a thread over at Cynosure MB (yay, go referrals!) Apparently I’m really mean, and I know everything. Actually, I’m not sure that’s what they meant, but that’s how I like to read it 
Consider this a continuation of everything I said about xoxmariah.com (now closed, harhar).
In the grand scheme of things, InstantRock.com is a far cry from some of the teenage tutorial sites I have highlighted in the past. The site text is not eye-wretchingly small, and the line-height isn’t in minus figures. The links are even clearly differentiated from normal text (although unfortunately not from the very trendily styled italic text). For someone based in Norway, the standard of English is on a par with some of my very own fellow citizens. Despite all this, the tutorials are shit. They are turdy, in fact, and thus the next Turdy Tutorials post was born.
Firstly, the Advanced Layout tutorial, of which there is apparently (1), returns “No input file specified.” (which is PHPs equivalent of a 404, generally). Broken links are bad, children, very bad. Since I started this post the Advanced Layout “tutorial” has been fixed. Now it features a guide on “how I slapped a load of shit on a page and called it a design”. Actually, I think that about sums up most of the websites I see these days…
Under Business Applications, we’re instructed how to make a “tabel”. Now, I could forgive this if it were a typo — we all have moments where our fingers and our brain aren’t working in unison — but this is repeated several times above and below a screenshot that clearly says “table” 6 times. These tutorials need to be labeled with the version of the software being used.
The CSS -> Background Image tutorial has an unnecessary { at the start of the code block, which is (no surprise) being displayed in a textarea. I’m thinking I should come up with some sort of catchy motto reminding people to use <code>, not <textarea> but I’m rubbish at that sort of thing.
Apparently, according to the CSS Stylesheet tutorial, CSS stands for ‘Cascadin Style Sheets’. That’s a new one on me; personally I was under the impression that the word cascading should be spelt with a ‘g’ on the end. Incidentally, I’ve always thought the term “CSS Stylesheet” was somewhat redundant, a bit like “ATM machine” and “PIN number”. I’m sure there’s a posh name for those sort of abbreviations… it’ll come to me, no doubt. Anyway, on the same page we’re given 53 lines of dodgy-at-best CSS that starts with <style> and ends with </style>, with instructions to paste this into a file called “style.css”… someone forgot to tell this kid that HTML doesn’t belong in a stylesheet?
Custom Textareas again features a superfluous } as well as an unnecessary font-weight property and “text-align: center;”! Who on this planet ‘center’s their text in textareas?
Navigation Blocks 1 & 2 are rip-offs of an old tutorial that was on swimchick.net (possibly still is?) and I’ve no idea where it originates from. It’s badly coded, of course: the pseudo-classes are the wrong way round and it completely deviates from any hint at semantics.
Tabel effect 1 [sic] tells us to “Copy this table code and add it to your css where your old tables are
” which is fine, in theory, but delivers us some customised h1/h2 tags. I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around this coding concept, and the next tutorial in the list (”Tabels - Learn about h1 and h2″) only exacerbates my confusion.
Apparently to save a page as a .php file (as per Saving pages as .php) we need to use:
< ?include("header.php");? >
Content here!
< ?include("footer.php");? >
…except that without header.php/footer.php files, all the user is going to get is “failed to open stream” errors.
As if we hadn’t already had enough shoddy code, there’s more. Adding a bullet using <img /> instead of list-style-url, customising cutenews (the very mention of the word cutenews aside from to warn of its insecurities is insane) and a content-type meta tag gets you listed on google.com?!
Don’t get me wrong here, I have absolute respect for someone who can speak more than one language. Aside from counting to 10 in Spanish and GCSE level French — most of which I forgot the day after the exam — I don’t have that ability. However, when the very words you’re misspelling are right in front of your eyes, there is no excuse not to correct the typos. When you could feasibly write tutorials in your native tongue and hit an audience that others might not be capitalising? There is no excuse. Turd is turd, and InstantRock tutorials are turd.
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