Day 33: Pondering Capstone Project Scenarios

I’m happy to report I’ve managed to at last get my “Friday” project to a good place, where I’m not tempted to hide it under a rock in shame. Everything is correctly functioning, and I even managed to make the UI look nice. One of my classmates helped me out with using Font Awesome icons to make my edit, view, and unregister links look sharp. Another helped me a few days ago with the “Select One” option for the dropdown, so that looks good.

I’m still pondering what to do for the capstone and the “team” concept. I had an insane idea of making my fictitious crafting teams compete to see who could knit and/or crochet the most squares for Warm Up America, with the winners getting a $100 gift certificate to Webs. However, if this were a real online contest, I can see a few pitfalls:

1. For one thing, I’d need to limit the number of team members, so that I wouldn’t end up with 100 people on the winning team getting $100 apiece (“Um, Sweetums, about that retirement fund…). I could perhaps have the winners as a group getting a $500 gift certificate—though I can just see the ensuing cat fight in the yarn store now. I know, I know…before I start getting hate mail, I’m fully aware that there are male knitters and crocheters! Perhaps I could limit the groups to five people, with the winners each getting $100 apiece.

2. Another issue—how does anyone PROVE how many squares they really produced? The only way to really prove it would be if the teams sent the squares to me, which would be its own logistical nightmare—I’d have to mail all the squares to Warm Up America MYSELF ($$$). Also, people in the home environment probably wouldn’t take too kindly to an entire room being filled to the rafters with tiny 7” x 9” squares (yes, I’m aware this would technically make them rectangles). Perhaps I could have people post a picture of themselves with all their squares before they mail them to Warm Up America. Surely no one could fake piles of squares. I mean, even I—the ultimate crazy yarn woman—don’t have 100 squares lying around to pile up and fake for a picture…However, one can never underestimate the sheer prowess of the truly delusional among us.

I do have time to suss this out before next week.

(I’m sorry Randy and Gary! I know you’d never stage a cat fight in a yarn store! However, I can see one of you convincing the other team members that Webs was no longer in existence… 😈)

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…