My overall thoughts for this class are all over the place. I have felt many emotions throughout the process, but am glad to be on the other side. At first I felt completely overwhelmed and lost. I then turned to getting frustrated and mad. Then I taught myself that all you really need to do is have a clam temper and think about things the way a developer would. I think that this was my key to success in for the final project.

Instead of thinking extremely hard, I brought it down to my own level. For example, when I wanted to put a contact form at the bottom of each of my pages, i thought about how that might look. At first I was thinking too big picture and that I would need to put the code into each individual page. Instead, I took a step back and realized that if I put it into the footer of the page, that was automatically already formatted to be placed on each page and therefore I wouldn’t have to write code in various places.

This class was a good example of the quote, “work smarter, not harder.” I was making things way too hard and have taught myself a new perspective on what it takes to create code.

My portfolio turned out to be much better than I expected. I didn’t have very high ambitions at the beginning, but when my code started working, I got very excited and wanted to keep adding more. It was weirdly addicting — kind of like when you finally get a really hard math problem right. You are very proud of yourself and want to show off what you can do.

This skill has already brought so much into my career. I was the hit of the day when I created a “Fake News” picture on the New York Times website by using the inspect tool and changing the title of something and sent it to my team at work. Working in PR for Federal IT clients, they are often talking about GitHub, and I am now aware of the types of tools they are using and can explain the lingo to my colleagues.

I am very thankful that I took this class and didn’t give up. There was a moment there when I truly contemplated it. I learned a lot, and most importantly, will be able to use it in my career.

This week I feel rejuvenated. I sat down last weekend confused and not sure exactly where to begin. After class this week, I was able to really think about the things that I want on my site, and visualize how I wanted it to look and feel. On Friday I took the night to work on the project, and really got into CSS. I was on a roll and was getting really excited as more and more designs began to come alive on my page.

On Saturday, a few girls in the class came to my apartment complex to work on the project together and be able to bounce ideas a hardships on each other. We worked for about four hours, and I was able to add to my CSS from the previous night. I learned that my work from the previous night wasn’t exactly best practice, and so I worked on calling out the specific id’s and classes that day.

I will need to update my final-pitch post with my new plan of attack, and how I intend to make changes to my final project. (I will be doing this tonight, or early tomorrow morning.)

Question:

1. My main problem at the moment is that I am trying to get rid of the sidebar where the widgets would go, so that my site content is centered. I have reworked the CSS so that the wording is centered, and created new php child folders for page, search, sidebar, and single that have the “sidebar” functions deleted. So my question is how to go about deleting the sidebar. That is the way that worked for Lucy, but for some reason it isn’t working on my theme.

As for right now, that is my main question. As I continue to work throughout tonight and tomorrow I may come up with a few more and will email them to you.

We were talking about the readings about API and although it helped us understand how the web works, we’re not exactly sure how it applies to our projects or if we need to add it to them. However, through the readings I was able to understand the purpose of an API and how websites like Facebook and Google are able to get and provide the information and data that they do. The only real thing that I didn’t understand about API was REST API and the JSON aspect.

I have officially began working on my project. Unfortunately there has been a minor setback in that my database is not hooking up on my local server with my folders. Therefore, I am stuck trying to get things to work and worried about erasing my database as a whole. I’m not exactly sure why because it was working the other day in class, and of course when I get together with Jaclyn and Lucy to work on the project now it won’t work.

Back to the project, I am getting nervous that I will not be able to completely understand everything in order to get things done. I need to do some research tonight into WordPress and how to make changes to it.

A few questions that I have are :

1. If we are adding an HTML element where would we place that code?
2. If I am making changes to a plug-in, which folder within the folder do I make changes? And with that, do I have to make a plug-in child?
3. How do I fix my database problem?

Overall I’m hopeful that I will get everything completed but am getting frustrated that things aren’t working in a way that I can even get started, and that the week before our final is due we won’t be able to have hands on help if we truly need it.

When I was contemplating what to create on my site, and choose for my final project I began thinking first of what code I could realistically change in order to change the WordPress platform. I was having a hard time even thinking of how this could be done. Since I missed the week on WordPress, I was a little bit lost. Thankfully after last class, I understand now that you go into WordPress and actually work from their code to in order to change it. I hadn’t fully grasped that concept and still thought we were writing all of the code and creating our own website for some reason.

This week’s reading have been very helpful and insightful. After I figured out which project I wanted to do, and then learning the proper format to do it, I started thinking about where to begin. I felt overwhelmed and wasn’t exactly sure what should come first, second, etc.

Thankfully, this week’s readings were helpful. I still haven’t really understood all of GitHub’s quirks and abilities, but the reading on GitHub’s site on features for collaboration were extremely helpful on how to think about starting. I was able to kind of get the gist of how you can seamlessly review and add to your code. However, once I go to my site I always get very confused. So I might need to come in early (if work allows) and truly go over how to correctly work with and post to my GitHub account. Right now, it shows a very confusing screen when I try to add anything, so I think I do need to go over that again.

I found the article called Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic in Design Thinking particularly intriguing when they began talking about how you need to think about design first in order to fully understand what you will need to do in order to create that design and its features.

This weeks Codecademy was not that difficult. I found it pretty easy to follow and understand, unlike the Javascript one that was a glitching and took an excessive amount of time to complete.

I found it very interesting to learn all of the different things that PHP can do. For example, it can:

• evaluate data from a browser
• build custom web content to serve the browser
• talk to a database
• send and receive cookies

I found it very helpful in class when we took time to  really go through again what the servers and browsers do, and how they are able to read the different languages of HTML and PHP as well as others. For instance, the learning of LAMP:

• Linux
• Apache
• MYSQL
• PHP

This would be how WordPress runs, the platform that even this site was created on.

In class, it was also interesting to learn about the backend of PHP and websites. Professor Linch used an analogy of databases being like tables. The columns are called fields and the rows are called records. These “tables” are all connected to each other through different ids and allow websites to function properly.

I also found it helpful in class when we went through and downloaded MMAP and went through the specific steps we needed to take in order for our PHP to show up. I find step-by-step tutorials better and more informative than when we were just going through the W3 Schools websites and briefly talking about the different types of variables and things we might come across. I am a visual learner and find it helpful to truly break it down to its simplest principle, write it out all together, and implement it to see what the outcomes are.

I think in the future that it would be helpful during class to have more hands on work that we all have the same assignments to work on and we work through them.