Page has been tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. Mostly passes.This page is the work of a single person.
It doesn't try to sell you anything.
You don't have to "register". It isn't cluttered with "injected junk" apart from the Google panel at the side, and the Google bar at the bottom. (They help me see what pages get visited, so I can concentrate on the things people find interesting. Having them may help my Google ranking, so you find out about the page.)
It is early days for this site... but it links to (and is linked to from) pages that go back twenty years or more.
I sometimes wonder, I get so little feedback or encouragement.
I find much of life boring. On this site, and the ones that it is the successor to, I try to tell you things that might help you get started with things that I find Not Boring. I.e. "interesting". To me.
Will you find the subjects interesting? Will you find the way I've explained them interesting? I don't know. I hope so.
-----------------------------------------
For many years I was an enthusastic author of help and how-to articles written for OpenOffice users.
I am a great believer in open source software and of cross platform, aka multi-platform, software.
I very rarely pay for software, but I use my computers intensively on a wide range of activities. I see no reason to pay Microsoft to use their "Office" when LibreOffice is available, does a good job, and offers elements MS Office lacks... a database you will never outgrow, in particular. (The foothills of the learning curve for any database are tedious, if you are going to use it for anything more than you might just as well do in a spreadsheet. But you can "use a hammer to drive a screw" only up to a point. Mastering the basics of database use will pay huge returns in due course.)
A few years ago, I migrated to LibreOffice. Most of the OpenOffice tutorials remain valid. Those pages are mostly on my old sites, but material from 2023 onward will be appearing here. And some old pages may be moved here. To start things rolling...
Interactive PDFs. Guidance on how you can make, for free, PDFs with text boxes, etc, that users of the PDF can interact with. To fill in a form, for example. There is a sample editable PDF you can download to try out, and the .odt used to create that is also downloadable.
Conditional Formatting for Calc Cells... and more! I had a slightly esoteric need in my "real world" life, and filled it with a spreadsheet.
In creating the spreadsheet I used conditional formating, and the tutorial explains what I did. There are some other crafty tricks in the spreadsheet you might also enjoy and find useful.
The spreadsheet displays a particular piece of ExIF data from each of a batch of photos I took.
-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Introductory tutorial to help you with CSS: How to use CSS in your website. I've worked hard on this. And I learned CSS the hard way... self taught, trial an error. I hope this saves you some trials.
Niche topic! How to make 4 wires "play nicley", stay together if you are making up a cable for some electronics project. I told you it is niche!
Bite size CSS snippets: Some odds and ends which might help beginners.
Well... someone might need this! I hope the search engines will help the next person NOT to have to reinvent this wheel: How to disassemble a Lenovo SM-8861 mouse.
-----------------------------------------
Huge and unusual "Grade A recommended"!: This page is smaller than many of mine. But it is bigger in ambition!
The code that comes with it shows you a control structure that is at the heart of many of my biggest and best apps.
It also has a fully worked "shell" of all the ini file mechanisms, and it has many of my usual "should be in every app" bits and pieces.
I hope you will take the code, which is a modest skeleton, and use it as a starting point for projects of your own.
As is my custom, the page has a link to let you download the full Lazarus project. The "tutorial" is in the comments in the sourcecode.
There is no "universal" boilerplate code that will do for any app. This boilerplate is most suited to apps like sensor monitors or process control. Once started, it has a job to get on with. By the nature of what it is doing, there's not a lot of call for interaction with a user.
-------
Fetch stuff using https: Sample code on for fetching the HTML (or whatever is at the ULR of something using HTTP. THis doesn't have much in the way of a "tutorial", but it does let you download a Lazarus project (and a copy of the .exe it produces). The sourcecode is full of explanatory remarks. Fetch stuff across the internet, or just from a webserver on your LAN... something you can put in a $20 Arduino.
-------
Ini files: Tutorial and sample code on using ini files... a new version of a topic I've covered before. This version, I hope, more concise! (See also the above. It is even newer, but it has less hand-holding, less explanation than this one does. The one above uses ini files, but isn't primarily about ini files. Ini files may be "yesterday's answer"... but they still have a place in today's programming, I think. I've also done a bare-bones checklist of the bits you must include to use ini files with an app.
-------
Slideshow app: From the link in the next paragraph, you can get something that doesn't have a "proper" mention in any of my other "index" pages, yet. I also offer a page (with another copy of the download link) that will tell you about my simple "slideshow" application.
You can just download the application and sourcecode of my simple "slideshow"- free. For Windows. Yes! Yet another!
I have started moving my "Helpful Hints" pages to here from their first home. Some of those pages are at their old home, some at a third site(!)... but some have made it to here. Apologies for any navigation snags you hit... PLEASE write and tell me, if you encounter one?
My older sites, reverse chronological order include...
(You might also notice some aliases at work. For instance, Arduserver.com takes you to SheepdogGuides.com/ardsrv/)
What You Want To Know (wywtk.com) has also acquired a few "Book Mad" (i.e. "mad about books"... a collector) pages. The main "trove" for those is on my older site, and has it's own, "Books" index page.
For now, I suggest you head over to my old, mature sites... There's an index to them at...
There is a lot of "stuff" in them... particularly "stuff" about using the Libre Office database, using Lazarus (similar to Delphi), using the Arduino.
This page's editor, Tom Boyd, will be pleased if you get in touch by email. Suggestions welcomed! Please cite "wywtk/index.htm".
Page has been tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. Mostly passes.
AND passes...
....... P a g e . . . E n d s .....