For  a while, Ben and I parted ways on our coding adventure.  I understood.  Nothing destroys the cool of coding quite like your mother learning it.  As I got better in  JavaScript  I started developing the annoying habit of delivering helpful tutorials. It wasn't going well, so I decided to pull back. I pointed him in another direction, and promised  I wouldn't touch Ruby for a year.

Then last week codecademy started lessons in Python. We decided to give it another shot.  

First I needed  to  stop being so parental, and do what I could to get back in touch with my inner eleven year old. So, yesterday we took a break from code learning, and had some fun with the "x-ray goggles" at  Mozilla's Hackasaurus.  This is a great little tool that helps kids learn HTML and CSS by allowing them to mess with what they see in their browser.

X-ray goggles allow you to scan the different sections of the page, see the HTML/CSS code, and change it right there on the spot. The first exercise is to download a url for an image  and change the Hackasaurs girl for a Serious Cat.

Once you've done your first hack, you can drop the goggles into your bookmark bar and  head out onto the web and mess with other websites. Ben's first choice was the official webpage of Lady Gaga :

I felt Usher could use a little serious cat treatment too:

And it was inevitable that Ben would start hacking the  family website:

Fortunately only what's in the browser gets altered.  The actual website is safe.

Imagine  a web where  cats could learn to code....that could get serious.