Tag: GitHub

Day 30 and a half: UI Envy

It was an UGLY day of trying to pump out yet another Friday project. I stayed at class until almost 7:00 p.m. on Friday, trying to finish. The good news is that I got the jQuery/JavaScript working, and I managed to throw in field validations by the end of the day. I still struggle with where to put events in relation to the JSON callbacks. I did manage to validate the dynamic HTML, which was a good thing, as I had some ghastly error involving my generation of dynamic links onto a page.

This morning (Saturday) we had an email from our other instructor. He had some general feedback on the sites he’d seen so far in GitHub. It actually was a good thing, as I was able to check on and update my site. Despite looking it up on stackoverflow.com, I struggled with getting an image into my readme.md file until I just downloaded one of his readme files out of GitHub and reverse-engineered it to fit my needs.

So, the only thing I had left to do before the Saturday 5:00 p.m. deadline was to make the user interface look good…

I have a confession. I’m artistic at certain things, but not others. Even with my knitting and crocheting, I great at techniques, but struggle over what colors to choose that will work together. It’s always the way…I’ll think I have a great-looking website, but then I’ll look at other classmates’ Friday projects and mine is pathetic-looking in comparison! When it’s a matter of coming up with funny-sounding or interesting text, I’m good at that, but my illustrations and placements are usually plain and downright dreary.

For instance, I FINALLY got an image to cover my Jumbotron on the main page, without looking stretched-out, blurry, or just plain ridiculous. I was so excited! Then I glanced over at other pages and people have carousels going, and multiple interesting illustrations, and beautiful interfaces that just made mine look like the sad, pathetic wallflower of all sites.

I’ll need to up my game for the capstone project coming up…

Day 29: AJAX…not just for scrubbing soap scum!

Today we learned about AJAX calls. Hilarity ensued this afternoon as we all had to create an application shell (some of us may have forgotten to engage GitHub first and had to start over again with the folder in a GitHub repository folder). We fired code for the web server—up to this point, we’ve been relying on the “Live Server” from Visual Studio Code. We’re using something called a REST API. I know it sounds like a high-end day spa, but it stands for “representational state transfer technology for an application program interface that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE data.

There were a few fits and starts as some people inadvertently killed their web server.

We also used Postman to test out our connection to get data, post data, etc. I know. I can’t get the song out of my head now, either…

EAR WORM!!!

Mr. Postman

I’m happy to report that, as of 9:10 p.m., I got my new entries to post to the JSON file! Now I just need to figure out how to PUT for the update file. Watch—that will probably be tomorrow’s project!

Day 15: The Outside World

Last night, after class, I took a much-needed respite and went to a music festival concert. Our local orchestra does a concert series every Friday during the summer, featuring a different theme every week. Last night’s was a tribute to Elton John. It was a fantastic night.

Of course, that’s not what I’m here to talk about…earlier in the day, we all survived a 1-day—we’ll call it a sprint, for lack of a better word (Agile pun intended). We had eight hours to create a 4-page site featuring three financial calculators with about six different equations. I confess we got an assist from our instructor on one, but once we got that one done and figured out in JavaScript, it was fairly easy to google for the rest of the equations and plug them into our pages. It was fun, too, as we revisited our HTML and CSS coding with Bootstrap thrown in, and got to style the pages to our liking. We all ended up with pages that worked by the end of the day. It was A MIRACLE.

I raced to the concert last night, all excited to tell people about my wonderful achievement. Fun fact: unless people are coders, NO ONE really wants to hear about your adventures in coding. I was excitedly explaining my entire eventful day, my ups and downs and struggles to make the scripts work correctly. My librarian friend, who has taken coding classes as part of her library science degree, did understand what I was talking about, but everyone else looked like a deer in the headlights. It might have been more exciting to have the site loaded in a GitHub io repo to show them, but I hadn’t had time to do that.

We artists are SO misunderstood…the only thing less exciting for these poor people would have been had I tried to explain knitting short rows to them…

Day 8: I think I can…I think I can…

We have one more day to be done with our first project—Thursday at 5:00 p.m. to be exact. Yesterday was a black day where I found myself seriously contemplating whether or not, at 55 years of age, I’m still capable of pulling all-nighters. However, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’m happy to report that I’m almost done! I was hysterical over the “user interaction” page, but today I went through my Ravelry project folder, and all 2,555 photos on my phone, and managed to cough up six projects I actually created myself. I debated including something I like to call the “Scarf from Hell,” (there IS a story behind this), but I doubt anyone would pay me money for THAT pattern.

I can’t decide whether or not I should try using the optional JavaScript for the login screen that our instructor showed us. It would be impressive (and I’m wondering how “optional” this is), but I’m thinking it could also hose my site. I’ve spent hours upon hours shrinking and blowing up pictures to accommodate media queries, and scouring code for errors. It never fails to baffle me how code that seems to work just fine in the browser validates with 20 tag errors (including tags that are backward). I did figure out my error in deploying to the GitHub .io file…that old filename capitalization bugaboo bit me in the *** again! Something else I’ll need to fix tomorrow…

After all this, I’d just as soon not foul this all up with JavaScript I didn’t write…but I may change my mind tomorrow.