Last night I made the mistake of editing the files for a new WordPress child theme directly in Appearance -> Editor. It was going swimmingly until I added a few lines of CSS and changed some of the HTML in header.php. When I refreshed the page, the layout of the site had broken. And I backed up a few steps, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

That was when I realized I really should be coding in a development environment, and definitely not on a live site.

I’ve heard that Github is the most widely-used platform for open-sourced software development nowadays, so I’m going to put myself through some of its videos and start working with it. Here’s what I’m hoping I’ll be able to learn:

• How to track changes and easily revert to an earlier version/backstep if I do something stupid
• How to push a particular code version to a live site

For updates to this entry, check out the “github” tag.

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