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 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.

I spent the weekend making some minor modifications to the styling of my blog’s homepage, and got better at committing them to Github. I have also been tracking my progress and adding to do’s in the Projects section.

Today,  I dove in to my interactive map. I found a widget I like and activated it, and now need to figure out the right changes for the final look, feel, and functionality. I’d really like to like pins on the map to specific posts.

Once that is complete, I am going to focus on modifying the Comment box to add some additional input boxes and, if I have time, I want to customize a post for my travel posts – to include “Stops,” “Days,” and “A Short Memory” (or something like that).

And finally, the class has been posting about FileZilla and how to get our sites up and running live. I plan to test this a few times before next Sunday. Fingers crossed time permits!

On an unrelated note, but to Greg’s shoutout a couple week’s back, I came across this article today about Basecamp. For someone like myself who is very much into taking multiple/as many as possible vacations each year, this company is sounding more and more appealing to me! Their software uses Ruby on Rails, so perhaps my next adventure in computer programming needs to start there! 😉

Cheers and may the force be with you all! The finish line awaits!

Jane

Well, it took me until today to realize that I’d completely forgotten this.

I think I overall understand API’s? Or, at least the general idea and what they’re used for. It was helpful for me to look up different kinds of API’s etc. Honestly right now I’m mostly feeling very head-in-the-sand about the final project. (Like the feeling after a fun weekend and you’re scared to actually look at your bank account. So, I know I’ll feel better and like I have it more in hand once I’ve actually confronted it.) I’m quite confused and need help with the whole adding a subdomain thing. I’ve looked up the “adding a subdomain” page on Squarespace, but I’m not entirely sure about some of the things they’re saying. This misunderstanding on my part is majorly slowing me down.

I spent most of this week both reviewing and editing the photographs I’m trying to use/writing up the content, and muddling through the WordPress/Squarespace subdomain issue, and also ruminating on some of the stuff Andy suggested last week–ways to make the whole site a slideshow. Last week, Jaclyn very kindly sent me a site that has a file converter for MP4s to GIFs.

Another issue I’m having is just that my idea seems to be quite different from everyone else’s, so the questions asked in class don’t necessarily pertain to what I’ve been working on (or lack there of, given aforementioned issues.) But, it has been helpful to hear about HOW people are going about solving their problems–where and how to look at certain problems in order to solve them.

I have noticed that without doing Codecademy and with feeling kind of frozen on the final project that I haven’t been coding as much, and that has definitely been detrimental to both my understanding and output. So. I definitely need to commit to diving back in. Something I plan on doing starting tonight!

This week was definitely a reality check as I dove more into working on my final project. I thought I would have a better handle at incorporating elements of HTML, CSS and more into our modifications but I’ve found myself Googling a lot more than I thought.

Meeting with a study group this weekend was definitely helpful, but I’ve ran into a few questions that hopefully can be answered and potentially discussed in class this week:

1. At what point does coding modifications end and WordPress modifications begin? Is there a general rule of thumb we should be following when making edits (content is made through WordPress, style is through coding, etc.)
2. How do we modify items in our theme PHP files when they are written in PHP or HTML? I have come across instances where there seems to be PHP (or perhaps HTML we just haven’t learned yet?) that I’d like to change, but I’m not sure how we would in our child theme.
3. Can caching be explained further as we make our modifications? It has played a large role in my ability to refresh and make edits to various parts of my page, and I hope we’ll be able to talk more about this in class, ways around it, etc.

The readings this week were definitely a nice break from working through Sublime and Google – I especially like the API YouTube video, as Savannah mentioned. It nicely (and concisely) talked about what our topic for this week, and was a nice primer to what I’m sure will be a great conversation in class.

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.

This week, I have made some progress on my final project but not without kinks. I tried to open up my local host but again, it lost its connection on the server, so I have had to make some progress on the actual domain. Sometimes, it’s frustrating because I don’t know what to do to open it up.

I installed my header image and am now putting links on all my work, but am trying to add in “additional CSS,” to make sure I am coding. I went on GitHub to look for some CSS but my code is not working for some reason on WordPress. I am also having trouble making sure Greg will be able to see any changes I have made in code.

I added a plugin for Instagram which required some coding because I had to put in the id. I am also trying to figure out how to embed audio since they said the files I have for the podcasts are too big. I need to figure out how to make this website compelling and podcasts interactive.

Overall, it’s a slow and steady process. I am still trying to brainstorm ideas on how to make my website creative. The readings this week were interesting though. I enjoyed watching the “What is an API” video because of the “waiter” analogy. I thought that was a great analogy. The “Rest API concepts and examples” video was a little more confusing and had to watch it several more times to understand it.

The WordPress Rest API intro page was interesting. I already knew how to use WordPress before this class but never delved deep into how and why it works, so it was intriguing to learn how Rest API makes it easier to use WordPress in new ways.

Some questions I have are:

1. How can I embed audio in when the files are too large?

2. How can I add CSS into the WordPress domain when it’s not registering?

3. Why isn’t my localhost working?

These are questions I need to address next.

This week we learned about APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. I got the simple and straightforward analogy from this video, “What is an API?,” comparing APIs to waiters, but I am missing the big picture. APIs connect requests to data outputs, but what is the nature of the request and what is the data used for? Essentially, what is their purpose? In this video, “REST API concepts and examples,” we see how we can request data from YouTubes’s Facebook page and see how many likes it has, but you can see that simply by viewing the Facebook page… I know there is a lot more data that can be requested though, so is that the main point of APIs? Also, why would someone send a request to my website, “A Life Surfeited,” and should I concern myself with this? How can I use API to serve my customers?

I have spent most of today customizing my website and making Project notes in GitHub of things I want to do, change, add, etc. I also have many questions so am looking forward to our workshop class on Wednesday. The biggest thing I’m stuck on right now if finding the correct files to alter. I know I need to copy my theme files and put them in a child theme folder, but I’ve opened every file and am not sure where to begin. For example, I want to alter the padding around my website title/header, but I can’t find the right code in the theme header file. Or, I want to remove “author” as a column on my posts, but I can’t find the code for it anywhere in the post file. I’m sure I am going about it incorrectly:/ And google isn’t helping with this one – I keep reading that I should be adding my own CSS files (who knows, that might be right!).

I think once I get past this hurdle, I will be in a good place to knock out all the modifications I want to make. Then it will be on to testing on the live site and eventually posting live! In the interim, however, I plan to spend each day adding content to the site because mine is a travel blog, my goal is to have 6 total posts with images from places I have been recently. I also need to focus on adding and modifying a widget for my interactive map. I have narrowed it down to 3 options and will have to choose which is best based on the code (once I figure out how to find it!).

Wednesday night can’t come soon enough! 😛

Cheers,
Jane