Livre d'Or

have tried a few times to teach myself programming by going through exercises to write hello world programs and list-sorting programs and finding prime factor programs, and I tend to lose interest before I really learn anything, because I can't help finding the exercises pointless.

I am making the [retracted] effort to learn programming proper. (And really should make a proper post of my own.) But one of the things that help me this time around is that I'm doing everything until I have understood it, and in the process I am writing a thousand small applets for my own use, each doing a thing. Right now, I feel I need to learn at my own pace, so a project would be too much pressure. I think what we both have in common is the need to actually *program something* rather than merely typing out somebody else's code. (I've never learnt by just repeating the steps; I need to understand it - why would I choose this, what happens if I get it wrong, *how* do I get it wrong and how do I need to fix it, because _just_ doing it right - especially if half the time it doesn't work after all - isn't helping me much.


the option to colour-code entries on your reading page depending who posted them

What I would love is a better way to incorporate custom colours into the layout of a reading list. On LJ, I have a sidebar that shows custom colours for each person on my flist. On DW I have set custom colours, but right now they show up as a couple of pixels around the userpicture. And while I could work out which part of the CSS I need to modify to make that more visible, I would love the ability adjust this with clear instructions on 'add this tag in order to make this bit show up in custom colours'. If you're doing that, my eternal thanks will be yours. (and the ability to colourcode, say, a custom group would be icing on the cake.)