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Working on my final project has been interesting. I was able to work through most things and make sure I got the assignment done. Once I was done, I wanted to make the site live. I tried everything and I was able to do it. My local site was working normally, but when I tried to run the live site, my CSS was not showing. I think the issue is with my database but I can not figure out where exactly the problem is. Greg and I tried to work through it but still it was not working. I moved the files from local to the live on FileZilla but when I ran the site, still nothing was showing up. As a next step, Greg suggested I get a new domain and host. I got a new one and logged into the new site on FileZilla then I moved the files from the local to the live. When I tried to run my domain, nothing was showing up. I compared the two files (local and live) and they matched but on the browser it was not showing up. I am going to work on this a little more to try and run the file. I am not sure where things went wrong but I know that I mistakenly deleted the file and when retrieved it, something was messed up.

As I think about where we are right now, I feel very grateful to have taken this class. I am not sure if I am going to continue in this field of work. I might in the future, but for the time being I am happy I got exposed to such tremendous information. I am able to understand the basic codes on a minimal level and get around when it comes to inspecting a site or understanding web development.

I do not need to code things at my current job, but sometimes I need to update the website and need basic knowledge of the back end of the site. For example, I need to update the website with new information of an upcoming event. The site is made up in a way that I need to embed the image of the event into the body. I do so by sourcing the text and embedding the code of the image into the text. The body of the text is HTML and I need to know where to put the code. I was comfortable handling such task because of my experience from this class. I am excited of what the future has to bring no matter what next steps I take.

Final Thoughts

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Wow! Are we really at the end of the term? In a weird way, it feels like it has been a long, but short journey. I will admit that this class was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. There were times when I felt pretty strong in the material we were learning and other times when I wanted to completely give up. I feel like I have a lot more respect for web developers and I think it would be a cool opportunity in the future to be a communications person working very closely with a developer.

I thought I would be extremely proud of the final product, but I ran into the strangest issue yesterday. Although I was updating code and running all the software, my local host would not make updates and it became extremely frustrating. I feel like I might have de-bugged the issues, but I don’t know because I can’t see it. I know that our updates were due yesterday, but I am hoping for peace of mind, I will be able to figure out what the issue is.

Anyways, at first I did not want to do any customizations that would challenge me, but now I am glad I picked ones like the map. I feel like this gave me a glimpse of what it could be like in the web development world. Sometimes there might be a client that visualizes something so complicated and the developer saying, “Oh yeah, we could definitely make this happen,” and then realizing that it wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. I felt this way when I was brainstorming customizations and then realizing that it wasn’t as easy as following along to a resource online.

Overall, this class could come in handy one day.  I’m sure I won’t think about how frustrated I was in this class, but instead be able to empathize with the developer and agree that web development is no joke!

 

The little things

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I’ve actually really liked the feedback process here. It’s very collaborative and helpful to get the perspective of others who are on my level to get an idea of what they are seeing and what I’m not. I also liked giving the feedback — it was comforting knowing everyone else was having problems similar to mine and I enjoyed helping others get through those problems.

I’ve been trying to button up the little things on my site, including this little dropdown arrow that Greg pointed out, doesn’t appear when the menu is activated. Spoiler alert: I haven’t figured it out yet.

From what I’ve been able to tell, the menu is using a state-based CSS indicator (not sure if that’s the right word) that is hated online. I’m able to manipulate the element by calling the class and adding a box (that’s one piece of customization I did), but I have no idea how to access it when the menu is expanded. I eventually just put a post on a forum for the site and am waiting for a response from the folks who know better!

I’m still thinking of ways to improve the site — I embedded my resume in order to keep people on the site, per Greg’s suggestion, and I’m playing around with more styling like typefaces and getting rid of the bold for hyperlinks.

Murphy’s Law?

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It always seems like the closer you get to finishing a big project, the whackier the obstacles in your way become.

When that time comes, I always find it helpful to clearly define my priorities—what needs to happen, what’s do-able, and what’s nice to have. This week, priority one was getting my live site up and running. Surprised? So was I.

I hadn’t looked at my project for a few days. I thought a full step away from the project would give me the energy I needed to finish the final push. But when I logged on to take a look at my site, I saw nothing but the WordPress White Screen of Death. Nothing on the front-end, nothing in the admin.

And that’s how I learned to pull out error messages from the apache_error.log file. After a quick google search, I learned that that was one of the best places to look. I also restarted my server, and realized I couldn’t connect. Queue the next half hour with the EasyWP support team.

Long story short: my site is back up and running, and I only lost a few hours of working time.

But I realized something heartening. If this had occurred a few weeks ago, a month ago, a semester ago, I don’t know how comfortable I would have been conversing with the support team. But I did it! I had done my research, I had concerns that I could articulate and I could answer the questions they asked me. That’s a skill I know I can carry forward in my life and career.

As far as progress on my site is concerned, I’m trying my best not to break things in the process of fixing something else. I’ve fixed a minor menu issue and have a fully-functional Jobs plug-in. Work remains on my Events plug-in, and I’ll need to decide whether to prioritize a bug-free plug-in over one with all of the bells and whistles, but that might not work.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my site. I really appreciate everyone who took the time to give it a look, and have added a lot of those suggestions to my list.

WordPress long haul

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For the last couple weeks of the semester, I am just going through the final pieces of getting my WordPress up and running. After getting my new laptop, I had so many issues — primarily, it was dealing with the back-end installations. It was really difficult to move forward feeling that even if I had customizations done, I would not be able to visibly see as I made adjustments to code. I had on my local site the themes I wanted, posts, a customization of a wine list instead f a reading list. I tried exporting my local host as a file into my downloads folder, then going to my WordPress site via my domain name from the admin page, accessing Tools, then importing the file that I just exported.

However, I was not able to see anything except for the posts that I made. This was frustrating to say the least, so in order to be able to have something for others in the class to look at, I did go onto my live site from the domain and made some adjustments and slight customizations so that the theme and concept of my WordPress site was something that others were able to look at. Next, I have to reply all to the email with everyone in the class to relay that information to everyone. One of the things I was having issues with beside getting my local to my live site was some simple CSS that I just have to spend more time on to figure out what will work the best. I have this idea for the widget area in WordPress to stylize and customize it. Specifically, I could not get something as simple as the text in the widget area to change to a different color even though the rest of my CSS was working.

Not Susan’s Thing

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In this last analysis post I decided to write about the experiences I had during finishing up my project for the past week and the updates I was able to make.

While completing this assignment I aimed to create a prototype website and concentrate on the coding rather than the actual text as well as the easy edits on WordPress. However, after the peer review, I added more content to the blog posts for a more “natural” look of the website. One of my classmates stated that displaying recent comments and archived posts on sites like that is just distracting and makes the layout busy, thus would consider just removing them. My update to this issue included deleting the recent comments on the sidebar, however, I kept the archived posts, since I believe that they are important when searching for content on a blog.

One of the most important improvements to the website regarded the margins. The issue was that the content was stretching all the way across the page, especially on mobile devices. I was able to fix the margins through manipulating the .css on the custom page. The other matter, I was able to fix were social media links, an essential part of any fashion blog. Therefore, I manipulated the footer and added social media icons. I also embedded links on there. Adding a footer at the bottom of the website was also a good idea, since the viewers can have something to reach out to once they finish scrolling.

In general, it was an interesting experience, however, I believe I didn’t have enough knowledge to perfectly complete such a complicated assignment.

working on plugins and replacing

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I spent the weekend working on my final project, and I’ve still got quite a bit to do.

I have to add a 404 page, finish styling the individual pages and making adjustments to the 4ish plugins I already have. I plan on replacing the chatbox one with one I build myself if that’s possible. And I will likely add a static shopping cart at the top right of the site’s homepage and following pages for users to book repair/purchase items.

I originally had a slider on each unique page and I took it out when transitioning from the local host to the live site. Starting to regret that, as it did offer some individuality. I think building an auto slider would be good for the site (technically it would be be eight — one for each main Acoustic/Electric page and another 6 for each page, along with unique corresponding content). I reviewed pages that carry a similar vibe I’m looking for (elderly.com and reverb.com, for instance), and they take advantage of sliders. I may also add a footer with helpful direct links to other pages.

Pieces

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This week I got to work a lot on my final assignment. I had a mini heart attack when I mistakenly deleted my htdoc folder and thought I lost everything. I was able to find it in the trash and restore it, but then my website stopped working. Then, when I got back on my desktop, I was able to restore it all. Thankfully.

I watched a lot of videos and tutorials. I read a lot of articles. I asked my friends many questions. I think what helped me the most was taking the time to absorb all the information. All the materials I found were very helpful and allowed me to articulate different ideas into the final project.

I am going to take the time on Tuesday during class to work through some other areas of my website and make it better.

I want to take some time and reflect on the process of developing my code. I started by wanting to customize a contact form plugin. That idea went out the window when I realized what WordPress already offers, so I decided to just use an already existing code. I, then, decided I am going to code a plugin for the services I offer. This plugin ran well, but I had an issue connecting the menu on the first page to the services plugin.

The second thing I was working with was a plugin that asks the user a question. The question is “what is your favorite social media platform to use?” the user would submit an answer to that. The final thing I did was a child’s theme to the Twenty Seventeen theme I choose. The child theme changed the font and the color of the main text. I inspected my website and made the changes there first then came back to my Sublime and made changes to the code.

I also added social media platforms and other codes into my website. I also changed the main theme’s image into a Georgetown one, which reflects a big part of who I am as a professional and a person.

Overall, this was a great exercise to work with WordPress because it is an extremely useful site. As I used it more and more, I got to learn a lot about it. It is SEO-friendly since it is written using standard compliance high-quality code, which I came to learn is loved by Google and other search engines.

This is just the beginning

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The final project has really been a great eye opener to what the programming experience is like. I chose to work on a news website for African related stories and little did I expect the complexities and uncertainties ahead, but it has all proven to be worthwhile. For my code customization, I sought to develop a breaking news tab with motion text, a top stories tap, main and current story tab, and a contact form. I tried to create a subscribe tab and a country profile search bar with some in built code, but ran in to a few challenges. I was wondering and rather needlessly on how to get the text moving in my breaking news tab until I discovered the <marquee></marquee> from W3schools.com, a great resource for every programmer. I also realized that, just like learning language, the more vocabulary one have the more confident you become. My fears were born from a lack of information on most of the tasks I had taken on. Scanning through the many resources on W3School, I noticed the huge deficit in my HTML, CSS, and PHP vocabulary.

I stumbled on a few challenges, like consistently getting a 500 error on my live site after importing the files from my localhost, which gave me a headache for a while until the next day. Also I realized after transferring the files to the live site that most of my CSS failed to display. I don’t know why, but I will be working on it and will be grateful for any ideas from everyone. Getting rid of the default images proved futile.

Looking back from the beginning until now, I have rich information in an area I had no interest or idea of ever venturing. I remain optimistic about the prospects for the future; hence, “this is just the beginning” caption.

Crawling past the finish line

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I don’t have a great feeling of accomplishment with my website, unfortunately. I don’t believe I’ve been able to complete the amount of customization required — I’ve customized the look of the site with CSS to a good extent, and I’m happy with the look. I think it’s clean and functional. Good design, I think, is both pretty and practical. I think I’m able to call the eye’s attention where it needs to go.

However, I simply wasn’t able to figure out where and how to add more functionality that would be useful without pretty much just following along and building a simple plugin from a YouTube video — I did add a couple simple customizations to the functions.php file.

I expected to have a lot more time than I ended up having. The migration from a locally hosted site to the live site was painful, as I was stuck in recurring errors when trying to activate a child theme. In the dashboard, my child theme wasn’t recognizing the parent theme — even though I had the parent theme installed. It was suggested the metadata included in the styles.css file was wrong, and that I could just replace the wp-content folder via FTP. Both solutions failed me, and replacing the wp-content folder took the good part of an afternoon to load.

I’m going to keep going and add more customizations when I have free time later this week. I do feel accomplished in the sense that I feel I’m able to use the site now as my portfolio site. My site is corydawsonmedia.com.