CSS

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I found that I was a quick learner when it came to HTML and it was a basic programming language. CSS added a slight complexity but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. With HTML you’re setting a basic framework for your website, so it doesn’t look that fancy. When I made my prototype HTML page, I added so much HTML code and it looked complicated through Sublime. When I put the file into my browser, it was such a simple page. I thought I accomplished so much, but I just made a paragraph with a title and posted an image. With CSS you can really see a page come to life. While working on the Codeacademy assignments, it was helpful that the coursework moved step-by-step. There’s many aspects to CSS and multiple ways you can manipulate a page, so sometimes its hard to keep track of what you’ve changed. After learning CSS, I can only imagine how long it must take a web developer to design a more complex website. Now that I know how to inspect the styles of websites that I go on everyday, it’s interesting to see the work that someone put in to creating it. CSS is definitely my favorite programming language I’ve learned.

The End of the Road…

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This semester has been an interesting one, to say the least. It definitely opened my eyes up to the world of web development and all the endless career possibilities that include the skills of web development. I am thankful for all the skills I learned this semester and excited to see how I can use them in the future. Following this class, I want to further my knowledge, to do that I want to do three things. First, I want to dive deeper into HTML. I feel like playing with that more will help deepen my understanding. I feel like we learning this is really the basis of web development. I can use these skills on making my online portfolio pretty unique and stand-out amongst the others. Secondly, I want to expand my knowledge of CSS. I’m really interested in the making things aesthetically pleasing, so a knowledge of this could really help my ideas become a reality. Lastly, I want to see how I can use these skills in my journalism career. I think having these skills will really help me in the grand scheme of things. My self-learning plans includes, to continue lesson on CodeAcademy, watching tutorials and speaking with the subject of my midterm regularly to help me troubleshoot issues. I will begin this plan over Winter Break, while I have more time to really do a deep dive, opposed to my jammed packed semester schedule.

Prof. Greg, thanks for all the guidance and insight you provided me this semester. I throughly enjoyed the class, it was a welcomed challenge.

The Final Step

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What a rollercoaster of a class. I went from being completely misunderstood from the first day, to at least being able to make some sense of the things I was coding. Web Development introduced me to a world of knowledge that I didn’t even knew existed. I was learning things I never expected to learn, in a much different capacity than anything I’ve ever experienced. The idea of developing a website that would highlight my self seemed like something that would have impossible to achieve. However, with a bit of help as well as figuring things on my own no matter the circumstance helped me to produce something I am proud of.

While I have now caught the bit of a bug that is coding, I could see myself being interested in exploring python. It is interesting to uncover different types of coding measures that could be used for any number of things. I think the best part about this class was to understand the practical meaning of the code we would be using in any given event. To understand what I was coding made a significant improvement on my ability to understand what it was I was typing in Sublime.

I appreciate this class for challenging me and for the knowledge I have gained from this class. A lot of credit goes to my professor and his manner of teaching the class. I hope I can take the things I’ve learned from this class and hopefully use it for something in my benefit for the near future. To be able to have some experience with coding in this class will gratefully benefit me when it comes to speaking about or even working with similar technology in the near future. I hope to continue my learning of this skill and perfect it in a way that it may benefit or advance my legal career. Thank you.

The End of the Road

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Just when I thought it was finished, I had 10 issues on my site. I was so glad to be done and then boom. 10 issues.

One of the most frustrating mistakes I made in my the post-development stage when I was attempting to fix my issues was editing code on the actual live site instead of in sublime text.

When I fixed my issues, I bypassed the customization feature. I clicked edit to access the code and I got a scary warning message telling me of the impending doom my site would face if I opened the code (format may be lost, etc.). This time, I bypassed the message. I made all my changes. I looked at the website and everything was shifted and unaligned. I tried desperately to restore the site to before I bypassed the message, but to no avail. I actually just shut my laptop and decided not to show the website to anyone ever again.

Now, I know the issue is that I should’ve edited in the files and in Sublime Text. Thankfully, my site’s format went back to normal and my website is worthy to be shown to other people again.

I’m proud of the work that I’ve done, though. I can actually say I’ve taken some tangible skills out of this class,

Project Analysis… Lord be a fence

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I was finally able to make my website.

This is one of the hardest things I have even done, and I even got help from classmates and Professor Greg. I felt much anxiety with the pressure of this website, but that comes along with much more. While taking this class with 7 others, a lot of things started to run together and I had a very hard time with the amount of task at hand, but that is besides the point.

I received a lot of help from my classmates and that is honestly how I was able to complete the site. In all honesty, I had no idea where to begin, but I believe this is because I genuinely had a lot going on all at once. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but had no clue how to begin this process. It is really hard for me to ask for help and I think that I can do everything on my own, but really sometimes we need to stop and ask for help. One thing is that I really wish that our professor was more accessible on campus with office hours, but this situation was very different.

The customizations on my site are pretty cool, especially the to do list. Although I had a lot to add to my site, the process I was at seemed very well for what was going on at the time. I learned a lot and eventually began to be able to do things on my own or by following general steps. I think because I am such a hands-on person, it was very hard for me to begin, but once a learned the steps it was doable.

My site needs a lot of work, but I am glad a lot of it is done. Making it live is a very difficult process and that is what I am dealing with right now, but by the end it will all be together.

Moving Forward….

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This class was……

Challenging for me personally. I thought this would have been a very fun, interesting, creative class, but it moved way too fast for myself. I am a hands-on learner and I know I need to go step by step to understand things. I would love to continue to get the hang of coding and web development, but this class was actually very difficult for me, but I also had a number of other complications in the semester. I think if this class was twice a week and we began to work on our projects earlier, it would have been a little less stressful for me in the end of the semester. The idea of coding and web development is great, but when I originally signed up for the class, I realized that it was not what I expected. I did not know what I was expecting, but it was not the experience I received.

Although, with the struggles of this class, I did enjoy it. I would love to see how I could build on these skills maybe if I take my time, and actually study the skills, I would grow to find passion for this skill.

Enjoyed the midterm, and the fact that we got to speak to a developer and see what they do and they work. Also, being a journalism major, I enjoyed the writing aspect.

Moving Forward……..

I enjoyed this class, and I learned a lot throughout the semester.

Reduced Speed Lane

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At this point during my process I was starting to feel a little nervous. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to finish this project the exact way I had envisioned it in my head. Reading through other people’s analysis post, I was not sure that this was going to be even worthy of turning in. So I went back to the drawing board and tuned into Codecademy. The small refreshers help to inspire me to get back into a believing in what I could do. So I started with, what would I want someone to see about me from this website.

The first thing I went to add was my resume. What other way does everyone get a full scope of the work I’ve done and also a sort of view of what I wanted to do with my career path. So I went to see how to embed a resume in my website. The only problem with that though, a resume is always changing and so how annoying would it be to consistently have to replace the code in my website every time that my resume changed. So I express this problem to my class mate, Jess, and she mentioned how she embedded her google docs link for her resume in her website. Instantly I was inspired, so with a little bit of her aide, she was able to teach me how to put my google doc resume into the website. Voila! A problem was solved and there was some progress.

The next thing I found for people to see the person I was, was to see who I was on social media. There is no more important tool in the world than social media. With this thought process I then decided to add my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I’m not active on Facebook or Twitter, but I would be an obvious liar if I claimed not to have one.

I was still looking for one last modification, and what came with that was a newsletter. I enjoy writing so why not have someone get my thoughts on a bi-weekly basis?

We’ll see how it turns out…

End of the Cycle

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Well, here we are, at the apex of this class. I can say 100% that I had no idea what I was getting to when I signed up for this class. This course has truly been an experience, to say the least. I thought by the end of this class I would be able to go talk to all my computer engineer friends and brag about how I learned all they knew in four years in 4 months. Today, I stand here a humble man and can I say I have the utmost respect for those guys.

Coding is a beautiful art, and like with any art, it takes a bit of talent, but there are ways in coding to become great without the talent. Yet, I think some of my classmates had a knack for it. They found ways to work through problems they had an come out on the other end. I even found myself in similar precarious situations that I was able to get through with a few Google searches.

I am proud of the fact that I did build a website for myself. I came into the class believing that it was going to be easy for me to whip up a website whenever I needed one. Yet I came to find out in the middle of the semester that it possibly might not happen for me. I also know I was fairly inconsistent with my performance in the class. In the beginning I was doing very well with learning and then it came to applying and it became a bit harder, however still a bit fun.

Most importantly, thank you Professor Linch for being patient with us throughout the class, even though you were going through things that I’m sure are very elementary to you, you still made it interesting while being very helpful. So for that, thank you!

I Can’t Believe I Built A Website

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Woohoo! The final project is done! I am really proud of how mine turned out and I have been showing everyone what I’ve done. Professor Sturgis, who was especially enthusiastic about this course, was excited to see everything I had learned. Currently, my portfolio has been updated to meet the requirements for another class’ final.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and learned a lot. I feel like I have expanded my thinking about computer systems and technology in general. I took to this course to learn more about the basics of “coding” and I feel I have accomplished that goal! It has been a lot of fun testing out code. It’s an incredible feeling when something I wrote actually works.

During the syllabus week at the very beginning of this class, I was scared. I actually considered dropping this course because it seemed like too much work. Now we are at week 13 and I can’t believe I have completed all the assignments — including the website!

Honestly, modifying the website wasn’t too hard once I had all the proper foundations set up. I think the hardest parts were setting up the child theme, setting up the local host, setting up NameCheap, and then setting up FileZilla. After everything was squared away all I had to do was plug and chug! After all, the final project wasn’t so daunting.

p.s. I got that margin to work on my homepage 🙂

There’s a plugin for that!

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My biggest challenge with my final project was that WordPress made everything seem too easy. I get it, programmers are lazy. Every time I tried to make a customization, I found out that there was a plugin that did all the legwork.  Also, there was a customizer (pretty sure it came with my theme) that worked through all the code and gave me a scary warning message when I tried to access the code manually. I was brave and bypassed it, which allowed me to customize the front page code.

Most of my code ended up being shortcode (that I did still customize) so I felt like I didn’t do the work on my site. My interactive map, which I feel is the pride and joy of my site, took the most work. I spent a lot of time inputting the photos, creating markers and linking to photos. I could not figure out how to make the photos on the markers bigger, so I had to settle with linking to larger photos. Between creating the map and the child theme, I feel like a real coder.

Overall, I found myself scrambling to create more customizations. Some things I incorporated were social media feeds, my interactive map, my resume, a custom meta box that allows to select which publication an article was written for and a contact form. My favorite feature on my site is the hero video. It makes me feel like my site is very modern.

Aside from the difficulties I had throughout the process, I have one major issue. My site still isn’t up because I can’t access the SFTP client.     🙁