Don't be afraid to make a mess - Don't expect people to be impressed, except yourself. If you want to do something you can't do, just do it whatever way you ca

Don't be afraid to make a mess - Don't expect people to be impressed, except yourself. If you want to do something you can't do, just do it whatever way you can at first (lift HTML from source views of pages, pre-render stuff with other tools, etc., hard-code variable data, etc.). Part of the idea here is to get into your mind you ARE capable of creating stuff. Once you get over that hurdle you can then think more about how to get it done better. I'd probably stay away from frameworks, sounds like you might want to get your hands dirty with code - frameworks can put up guard rails and barriers to get things done. Another idea is to take some crappy sample code or idea and expand on it; one of my first messing with PHP was making an event calendar - started playing with Datenator (a 2005 calendar program) Didn't like the program but it was something simple enough to pick apart, learn from, and rewrite to what I wanted. And my original calendar probably wasn't much better (code-wise) but it was more what I wanted and a start. So, do what you can, however you can, don't listen to those "you can't/shouldn't do it that way" people for now (work on resisting random HN opinions), after successes see how you can make improvements. Also during this "larval state" get comfortable with your tools and work to adopt good coding style (the bigger your projects get the more you need to have your tools working for you and have a methods to keep your data/code/data organized and readable).