Addressing the Confusion

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This week was a crazy week for me. I was in Philadelphia for the Asian American Journalists Conference and did not work on my project as much as I would have liked to, which means I need to be as productive as possible this week with my web page.

As Greg told me in my last blog post, I need to figure out how to override and add the CSS into my child theme and go directly to the plugin.

I still need to figure out localhost problems. Since my website has a lot to due with audio, I need to embed my Soundcloud links onto my website. It is really frustrating considering that my localhost also was not working 2 weeks ago. There’s so many roadblocks sometimes in this unknown world I decided to venture into.

I have not been coding nearly as much as I should. It’s going to be crunch time for me. I plan on adding more CSS, embedding the Soundcloud audio, and choosing my child theme. It’s confusing doing code sometimes without the help of Codecademy or an HTML validator. I’ve been trying to navigate FTP FileZilla with everyone emailing each other back and forth. It’s been helpful, but I’m hoping to make more progress this week.

It’s nerve-racking and confusing. I’m so confused sometimes by this project, but I’m hoping with hard work, I’ll be able to accomplish what I need to do.

Overall, this week will be the end-all-be-all and I hope I can do everything I can to make this project truly great. I know that anything worthwhile will have lots of challenges, and I have plenty here so all I can do is my best.

Long weekend of pizza and coding

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This past week/weekend has taught me a lot about the world of coding — hours can fly by without you realizing it. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re completing numerous tasks…you could have gotten no where. For a few hours on Saturday, as I coded with a few classmates, that’s how I felt. That I had done so much work customizing my WordPress site, but was not getting the results I was hoping for. For example, I finally had success creating a custom post type (YAY!!), but after creating the meta boxes (following the guidelines of the Reading List example Greg showed us in class), the meta boxes weren’t working. The information was not being echoed correctly, or at all. That was infuriatingly frustrating. Today, it’s still not working. After putting that to the side, I worked on creating two other custom post types, had written all of the code and was ready to conquer these additional post types (TV Review & Restaurant Review). To no avail, I realized that WordPress doesn’t allow for multiple custom post types. Even after hours of Googling the answer, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Any help is appreciated!

Update on my final project site:

  • I’ve created three custom post types with meta boxes as plugins. They don’t work properly, but i’ve created them.
  • I’ve updated the CSS of the child theme as much as I could to my satisfaction for the layout/display of the site. I incorporated Google fonts, HEX colors, and updated the main menu navigation.

What’s left to do:

  • Continue working on getting the custom post types and meta boxes to work!
  • Adding two plugins: Instagram feed and Contact form
  • Inserting content

The next few days should be interesting. I am really hoping to be able to get the customizations I set out to do done and to successfully complete the project. Below are a few questions I have:

  • How do we add multiple custom post types?!
  • how do we get our meta boxes to echo the information we put in them?

Big shout out to Allie, Jaclyn, and Lucy for all their help this weekend!

Custom Post Metaboxes and Styling My Site

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I spent most of this week working on creating a custom metabox and custom fields for my site. As I mentioned in last week’s post, I created a custom post type plugin to log all of my runs. I was able to create a custom metabox called “run details” with three fields — neighborhood, date, and time. However, I’ve been unable to get the data that I enter into the custom fields to save and echo out to my post type. I even rewrote my custom post type plugin according to the reading list example Greg showed us, but haven’t been able to get the data to save. So I now have two versions of the same plugin written in different code, but both have the same issue. I spent more than five hours troubleshooting this on Friday night, but to no avail. For now, I’ve moved onto styling my child theme in CSS. I did figure out how to get my custom posts to show up on my homepage, which was one of the questions I had last week.

I played around with adding this Strava plugin to my site, but the reviews for this plugin mentioned that it is not mobile-friendly. I confirmed this fact when I downloaded and installed the plugin, created a test post using the suggested shortcode, transferred the files to my live site using FileZilla, and then pulled up that specific post on my phone. The reviews were (sadly) correct — the table showing the data about my run bled out of the area of my post, and looked really bad. Because there are very few Strava plugins out there, and because this flawed plugin was the highest-rated and most often downloaded one, I decided to instead use the shortcode provided by Strava to insert a text widget into the main sidebar of my site. I did this on my local site to see how it would look, and then went ahead and added the text widget to my live site. I know this doesn’t count as a code modification, but having my Strava account linked in some way to my site was a very important part of my project. Perhaps the addition of this widget can count under the “content” grading criteria instead.

I’m likely going to have to abandon my plans to create a lightbox photo gallery due to the fact that I’m running out of time to work on this project, but I’m still hoping to build a featured post carousel onto the homepage of my site. I’ll also be writing some content so that I can have at least five posts on my live site.

I’ve been loading my plugin and theme files onto my live site via FileZilla. It’s so exciting to see my changes show up on my live site. I did have a minor snafu when using the FTP server the other night. Something happened when I was replacing my CSS file, and when I refreshed my live site, all of my styles had disappeared and my site was showing up in Times New Roman with bulleted lists. I may or may not have cried for a few minutes. I had to delete my child theme files from the remote server and then re-upload them using FileZilla, and that fixed the issue. Crisis averted. I’m hoping not to have any more scares like this before the August 6 project due date!

Reflection Part II

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This class has been really interesting for me–some serious highs and lows. I found Codecademy (except for the JavaScript section!) extremely useful. It made things simple, and I appreciated having something specific to refer to when I was embarking on my own projects and other assignments.

Overall, I enjoyed working on my project. I just wish I had more time—just to putz on it and see what works and what doesn’t. Actually, I can see myself fiddling with it over my vacation, because I’d love to have it more finished and to display it on my website along with my portfolio. Of course, that means I’d have to figure out some way to continue hosting it. I want to be able to use this—or a similar format—to tell other visual stories. I think it’d be a great way to showcase any sort of group of individuals. (I’d love to do a thing that showcased each of the tradesmen at Colonial Williamsburg. They’re really pretty. And interesting.)

If I were to reflect on the whole class, I’d say I’m just so glad to know the vernacular of this business. I feel like I can actually talk about it. I had to sit down with this girl the other day to start work on a blog via Google Sites, and I was able to solve problems she had come across, or at least I knew what to look up later.

I definitely need to focus more on the details and how each tiny element relates to each other tiny element. I need to learn to be more patient with it—along with having more time! I will be curious to see how the data visualization class links with this one. And I look forward to be able to continuing to immerse myself in these new languages. I don’t want to lose what I’ve learned.

Feedback on the class

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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.

Overall Thoughts

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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.

 

Class Reflection

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In theory, I am excited about and happy with everything I’ve learned this summer in our Web Development class — in practice, however, it has been challenging ad very time consuming for a full-time working professional. That said, I knew what I signed up for, and I’ve said this before, it’s like learning a new language that is supposed to be challenging and time-consuming!

What I am most excited about is coming away from this class with a useful product: my new website. I am already eager to begin building it out more. I want to totally change the theme and add more to the menu, more custom pages, and eventually add content to my blog posts. I will challenge myself to do some coding, but for the most part, I see myself using available plugins.

To that point, I am happy with the amount of intro knowledge about web development that I have gained since day 1 of the class. I do want to pursue learning more about HTML and CSS, and perhaps teach myself Ruby on Rails or Swift (more on this next week). I feel like at this point I have a much better understanding of what programming is and isn’t, and could communicate asks better with any developer.

Another thing I found helpful was some of the early readings about the history of computers, how we talk to them, what the internet, a server, or URL is, and why all of this is important to know as a daily user of these technologies. I’m also now more freaked out by the inter-connectiveness and seeming vulnerability of it all and my online footprint — but that’s for a whole other discussion.

A couple of considerations for future webdev classes:

  • While Codecademy was a great online tool to learn how to code, I recommend doing some more in-class lessons as well. Walk through examples from beginning to end like Codecademy does. It’s like a math class in high school — homework includes reading and learning about a technique or formula, as well as doing some example problems, then in class, the teacher would go through them and some additional problem exercises to really drive the lesson home.
  • I might begin the lessons about WordPress very early on (before Codecademy) and get test sites up and running. Next, learn about HTML and CSS, then go into WP and explore how in the real world you can make changes to themes or plugins. That would give people a lot more time to think about website and make changes they want. Also, I think for a good chunk of the class I was having trouble understanding how, in the real world, I would use any of the programming languages I was learning.
  • Help everyone get their site up and live instead of making it a “learning process” Unnecessary waste of many, many… many hours. ;P
  • Recommend Python or Ruby on Rails over JavaScript or JQuery. But that could just be personal preference for languages? I found JS and JQ super confusing, hard, time-consuming, and then never used again.

In conclusion, I would recommend this class to anyone interested in this field of learning or who works with web developers in their job. For me, I fall into both those categories — but was mainly just curious about the word of computer programming. I said in my first blog post that I am more of an analytical thinker, so for me, learning and applying the languages were relatively easy. But getting into abstraction and wrapping my head around some of the more conceptual ideas of development were tricky, yet fun.

Thanks for a great semester!

Cheers,

Jane

Making Those Changes…

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I was so relieved to be done with the project that I took a couple of days off to recuperate some.   Overall, I really enjoyed looking at everyone’s projects and thought everyone did a great job, especially considering that we all started doing this just a few weeks ago. It is amazing what one can do with commitment, energy and hard work. I thought the feedback on my project was solid: Savannah was right about my color scheme. I do need to make it more consistent.

In Greg’s feedback, he told me to make more code-based customizations, which I’m trying to work on right now. I’ve been trying to make a custom post type called Podcasts and make custom fields based on that. I’m wondering if I need to install a plugin though or if I should just do it on WordPress? That is the biggest question I have to ask for this.

I added descriptions for my podcasts and centered all of my SoundCloud links so it looks nicer and more properly indented. Someone suggested on a GitHub issue that I should put my Instagram plugin at the top of the page, but I like where it is. While I thought most of my critiques were solid, I kept my page as it is for a reason. One critique someone gave me was that my logo looked too small, but if I made it any bigger, then it would be overstretched. My boss will probably email me another image, so I will probably just have to change the logo anyways. Another suggestion was my menu. I have been playing around with it, but how do I change my menu exactly? I’ve gone into my wordpress menu and tried to shift things around, but my menu still looks the same.

Overall, this is a project I will continue to work on. There are kinks here and there but I’m proud of what I have created so far. The biggest thing I need to work on though are those custom post types.

Finding My Way: Final Project Reflections and Overall Class Thoughts

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Finishing my final project site was the best feeling. When I loaded the final versions of my Sublime files via FileZilla and clicked over to my live site and they actually (mostly) worked, I was shocked and relieved. I was — and am still — a little bit in awe of myself.

I am pleased with what I was able to create for my final project site. As I mentioned in my last post, my modifications included creating a custom post type plugin, rendering a custom metabox, and creating four fields within the metabox that I was eventually able to get to save. I also did a fair amount of CSS styling, including changing the fonts and colors on my site title, subtitle, widget headings, post headings, and body content. I also changed the color of my site’s main navigation bar and put it in a fixed position at the top of the page so that it stays there when you scroll down the page. Lastly, I changed the static and hover colors of the various buttons on my site and added Strava and social media button plugins. Although I wasn’t able to create the lightbox slideshow and featured post carousel that I had initially pitched, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish. If you had asked me 10 weeks ago what a custom post type was and what the steps were to build a plugin, I would have responded with a blank stare. I now know how to create one, or at least what to search for on Google in order to do so!

I’m planning to continue working on my site after the semester is over. I’m hoping to acquire some Adobe Illustrator skills in the coming months so that I can create a custom logo to feature in my site header. In the meantime, I’ll probably make my site title font a little smaller and also reduce the size of the header as a whole. I might also go with a more minimalist color scheme for my site by making my navigation bar the same color as my background.

Looking back on this class as a whole, it has truly been a lesson in problem-solving and troubleshooting. I was already a big user of Google before enrolling in this class, but I can honestly say that I have never Googled so many things in such a short period of time. As the semester went on and my knowledge and understanding of the different coding concepts and programming languages increased, I found myself having an easier time finding the answers to questions simply because I knew what to Google. Not knowing what to search for or where to look as I struggled to build my jQuery slideshow back in June as well as during the early stages of my final project work was frustrating. I quickly learned however, that there are so many resources and forums online that have people asking the same or similar questions. At times, it was reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one struggling with trying to figure out how to do something.

Thinking back to the very first Codecademy lessons on HTML and CSS, I can see just how much I’ve learned in a short period of time. I went from only knowing how to make a font bold in HTML to creating divs, styling classes in CSS, and using WordPress hooks to create different functionality within my site. The WordPress platform as a whole is something that intrigues me a lot, and I plan to continue exploring all that it has to offer. I learned that there is a WordPress meet-up group in D.C., and I may attend one of their meetings in the future to see what I can learn from more experienced developers.

One suggestion for future iterations of this course would be to start focusing on WordPress earlier in the semester. While I was able to eventually figure out most things on my own, I think it would have been helpful to have a better idea of how WordPress works before I jumped into creating my final project site. I had to do a lot of reading and researching to figure out what hooks and actions were and how they worked within WordPress, and I think that teaching those things and other WordPress-specific concepts earlier in the semester might help future students.

Overall, while I was certainly frustrated at many points throughout the summer and often felt like I was reaching a dead end no matter how hard I searched for an answer, I am grateful for this experience and for being encouraged to dig for answers and find solutions on my own.

Seeing the end

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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!