When looking back on this summer course, there are definitely things that I wish I knew better before I started. When I signed up for this class, I knew it would probably be challenging but I didn’t fully realize how time consuming it would be. I feel like some expectations were levied that I didn’t fully recognize, or understand. And given the past few weeks I have some suggestions for making the class better.

First and foremost, this should not be a summer course. There’s too much in the syllabus alone to justify the course being taught on a shortened scale. Either the objectives of the class need to be simplified, like taking out the project management week and extending the time spent learning JavaScript, or it need to be a longer course.

Second, the class needs a TA. Like the other technical classes I’ve taken, it’s paramount to have someone go through and make sure you’re actually clicking the right buttons and understanding the concepts before the class moves on. Only having one person there makes it really hard to do that, so a teaching assistant needs to be in the class if we aren’t going to go over the nuts and bolts.

Finally, I think expectations need to be managed on both sides more before this class is taught again. I know many people in the class, like myself, felt like things moved too quickly and not enough time was spent actually going through concepts we learned. For the most part it just seemed like a sprint to touch on any possible thing that could exist in web development. Instead, I think the course should correct and only teach more of the basics. Codecademy was useful for some things, like CSS and PHP, but it wasn’t a good use of time to work multiple hours on something that we then never really touched again, like jQuery.

Overall, I was able to learn some things in this class, but oftentimes I was more frustrated than excited about what I was learning. The class needs to be essentialized for PR professionals and journalists. While I appreciate that there were good intentions to get everyone familiar with web development, it needs to be scaled back before I could honestly recommend it to a classmate, especially one with a full-time job.

This week I was able to suss out where I am in the class as opposed to what needs to be done. This class has been challenging, and I think that I see the rewards of where I am from where I started.

When I came into this class I knew nothing about web development, and now we’re working on our final projects. I know the things I’ve set out to do are hard, and that I might need to consult people to make sure I’m on the right track, but seeing where I’ve come from has really made me feel better about where I need to go.

I’m excited to talk about project management this week in class. I’ve had some experience with project management, but seeing it applied to web development is something I didn’t expect, but it now makes a lot of sense.

I’m excited to get the hosting figured out on my computer and see where the final takes me. On to another week of web development!

It took a lot of work to get to the finish line, but we’re here!

After many additional calls with Filezilla and consulting two people I work with, Nick McEvoy and Jake Crump, I was able to convert my local site to my live site.

But, that didn’t mean everything was easy peasy. I lost things like the final project template and had to re-find the number that Word Press gave it. When looking to figure out how to isolate the pages, it took a lot of trial and error isolate the things that I wanted.

As I mentioned last week, the 404 page was really my saving grace in figuring out how to manipulate the rest of the items on my list. Once I saw how things could be changed I was able to move things around.

I’m really proud of what I was able to accomplish, and besides adding the 404 page to my final pitch I was able to do a lot of what I set out to do.

Now that we’re about to see presentations I’m very interested to see how people approached their finals. At some point I can’t imagine how other people did their projects, but that’s because I’m so in the weeds with mine. Very excited for Wednesday!

This week my final project went into high gear. I was able to get a good portion of the child theme done, as well as do some additional customizations that I’m excited about.

I initially threw a lot of work into the child theme, and my custom template thinking that would be my main final project. While most of it is done, I also made a custom 404 page, and it was really fun to do.

404 pages have really taken a life of their own on the internet, with funny pictures or good puns about pages not being found. I added to this with a particular embarrassing childhood photo that I am excited to debut in class next week.

As for the more serious parts of the project, I found my custom template a lot more involved than I expected. It took a lot of sleuthing to figure out how I could make it look like how I imagined, and a ton of trial and error. Over 2 hours was devoted to just figuring out how to make the background image fit onto the page.

While it was rewarding to finally see things come together, its been a difficult final project. I’m planning on tackling Filezilla soon, so fingers crossed I come away relatively unscathed with that.

Until next week!

This week was one of the quieter ones we’ve had because now its just the final push to the end. For me, this week was trying to put a lot of things into place for the final project, and there were some setbacks.

Overall I have a few things I need to set up before I can get into the meat of coding. Since I’m making a personal site I need to have some good photos of myself, and I also need to get the lines for my designed template made. I’ve reached out to friends to take photos and get some of the background images designed, so until then I’ve been retooling just the basics.

I hope to have the other stuff done this week, but life tends to get in the way. The deadline is approaching pretty quickly so I’m beginning to get nervous about puling everything off. But I’m sure I’lll have a better idea about things this time next week.

As for the readings, I’ve really grown to enjoy the stuff we’re looking at. The video about API‘s was informative and really synthesized what we’re going to talk about this week. However, at this point it seems like we’re in the nuts and bolts of our final so its hard to really pay attention to new information.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already past the halfway point with this class. This week I was unable to be in class, but worked on adding PHP to my homepage and set up servers for the final project. Overall, it wasn’t a terrible week, but I definitely missed class time.

One thing that I’ve realized is how important class time is. While I was able to listen to the class after the fact, it didn’t make up for the personal time with our projects. I would have really benefited from class time this week, but it shows how quickly this class moves.

While this week wasn’t as stressful as others, I still felt a little lost. But that was easily because I wasn’t in class while everyone set up their servers. Otherwise I feel pretty good going into the final project and the rest of this semester.

I’m going to be interested in seeing how hard my final project plans are. It would be really cool to pull off a new template for the Fine Arts team, but I’m not sure how much time or manpower that will take. Looks like I’m about to find out.