Loads of Codes

After going through what seemed like thousands of free themes, I ended up choosing a WordPress theme that was already featured(go figure). Choosing my theme and getting a visual idea of what my site will look like really made me feel like we just matured from newborn to toddler. I was extremely excited, and then I started going into the files of my theme. In these files were loads of code, some that I understood immediately and others that I have a strong feeling will take me a while to figure out. I am still just as excited to get the ball rolling on this project, but we went from like 30 lines max in Codecademy to, in my case, 573 lines of CSS and that’s just one folder. Looking at all of the files was a little overwhelming and I must say, thank you Greg for NOT making us do this from scratch. I remember asking in the beginning of the semester why in the world other coders would share their codes for free. I look back now and wholeheartedly understand the reasoning. They do it for people like me and I’m extremely grateful these people exist!

What I found most interesting is that I thought I’d have more difficulty understanding the codes but I actually had more problems understanding the comments explaining the codes. Everything has an official/proper name that I’m sure all veteran coders know. For example, in Codecademy when we’d practice, I often found myself commenting like “change box thingy” or “moves grid thing to the left”. That kind of language won’t get me very far in the real world of code and also won’t aid in my understanding of what others are trying to pass along to me.

I meant to ask this in class but when we are in GitHub and preparing to update and sync things, I remember we have to write a note saying what that change does. I’m finding that I may know what something does, but I may not know exactly how to say it. I’m sure the solution to this is just practice, but I probably need to figure that out sooner than later.

2 thoughts on “Loads of Codes

  1. Capricia Alston Post author

    I began trying to make just one simple change to my local site at around the same time as my original post. Now six hours later and I’ve made no change besides through the actual WordPress site. I don’t want to appear to be a quitter but I am nowhere near figuring out how to make changes from my local host to my website. As others have mentioned, this is something that I think needs to be gone over again in class but with everyone hands-on. My biggest issue isn’t that I can’t figure out how to use Cyberduck or GitHub(although that may be a close second) but rather that I seriously can’t figure out what codes are affecting what. I’m afraid to “get messy” because I don’t understand anything I’m looking at. Hopefully I will have a clearer view after class on Tuesday.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.