Awesome, thanks for the info! I'm also more of a designer than a developer. I work mostly in HTML/CSS, JS is something I experiment with, and I do/have done a lot of jQuery, but it's hard for me to get the hang of non-visual stuff. I spent a long time developing / massively altering WordPress themes. That sort of disenchanted me from it, because WordPress can be so bleh, I used to try and build cool little things (like a media player out of jQuery, which was the first thing I learned with it). Now I mostly just alter stuff to suit my needs, though I am working on my own Ghost (ghost.org) theme, so I'm not relying on someone else's theme that I've changed the CSS of drastically. I sort of stopped doing web stuff around the same time I stopped doing Linux stuff, I've focused more on my content since then. I did a lof of php, but always sucked at that. I do love ruby, especially Sinatra (which I'd call a framework, but apparently it's a DSL? I dunno), and I should probably tinker with it some more.
Ugh. I hate wordpress. I built our new site on CouchCMS which I cannot say enough brilliant things about. It's flawless. It's brilliant. It's amazing. It's perfect. It does everything and nothing and everyone at work who currently fails as being able to update content without screwing up layout or something has been able to use Couch successfully. The nicest thing is I GET TO CODE MY WAY - MY STUFF. It's 100% mine. Then I just place the tags in it, or make it editable, or have the pages be populated automatically with content, etc. Everything about it just makes sense. It just works. It's just like "duh" - the exact opposite of my experience with Wordpress and Joomla. I've had ruby on my list for a while but with all the amazing stuff people are doing with node.js and react and angular and sails and stylus and blah blah blah - I'm going to be learning that next. I really gotta start by fully understanding the concepts behind objects and server side stuff first though. That's the one thing I still struggle with. I work closely with my best friend and programmer at work so I get lazy about learning new things when he can just do them for me.That sort of disenchanted me from it, because WordPress can be so bleh
WordPress is good for some people, to me (I've been following it for a long time), it's gotten gloated and over complicated. Joomla was the very first CMS I used, and I used it for a very short amount of time, it was awful. I have even worse experiences with Drupal. Node.js looks incredibly cool, but I have the same problem as you as far as not really understanding objects. I can deal with server side stuff to a certain extent, but if I start seeing error messages, I lose my cool pretty quick. I ran various linux distros for about ten years, and that didn't change me: error messages in a terminal inspire terror in my gut. If I were still actively working on web stuff, rather than the casual stuff I do now, I'd absolutely force myself to be up to date on all of that, but I've fallen behind. My best friend is also a programmer. One night we were at my house trying to develop an inventory system for our workplace in php. I think both of us detest php, and we spent four or five hours debugging something that ended up being whitespace. ironpotato's tried to get me to look at programming stuff before, mostly application development, I think. I've tried to get him into web stuff before. We just can't get into the other's territory. Oops, forgot something: I'm a writer, so all I really need these days is a plain content-only website, that's why I use Ghost even though it's still pretty early in development.