Final push

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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!

Winding down + what’s next

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As we approach our final class (I’m really looking forward to having the Washington Post developer speak to us about her work!), it’s been crazy to reflect on how far we have come, as Greg mentioned, and what we are able to understand vs. what we are able to go. Our final project has been an excellent lesson is basically learning how to just Google and navigate our way through a world that is still very unfamiliar to us, in the big scheme of things.

I also can’t stress enough how much of an untapped resource Codecademy is — I so wish I had more time in the future to explore that further and teach myself more languages, even if I never get to use them. I definitely want to keep my account open and active so I can go back to it later.

Because I also did a portfolio site, it was hard for me to gauge exactly what I’d need to include on the page for it to look like a full-fledged portfolio that I would want to direct future employers to. In the future, I’d like to explore explore the portfolio pages of colleagues and other people in my field just online to see what other kind of interesting facets people will include (a slideshow perhaps? Maybe something more interactive with my work?). I’m looking forward to exploring this further, as well as continuing to hone and refresh my skills with CodeAcademy.

Final Reflection

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As our time together comes to an end and I begin to reflect upon this semester, I must say that although this course has been difficult, I would highly recommend it to any fellow student.

This class is not easy. It takes up more time than any other course I have taken at Georgetown thus far. It is confusing, frustrating, overwhelming at times, and intense.

But, at the same time I will leave this class with more knowledge than any other course I have taken over the past year. The skills I have learned are practical, rare within my professional community, and set me apart as an asset to the team.

I think my personal struggle is that I look at things as a big picture – in my professional work, I can determine what small steps need to be taken to achieve a larger goal and that has served me very well thus far. With coding, however, I am so focused on the end result I struggle to understand the small pieces that add up to the larger project. I think this is partially due to the fact that I don’t fully understand the smaller steps – I don’t fully understand how a website or app works to a point where I can say “I want my final product to be X, and must do A, B, and C to achieve that.”

Although this course has not taught me how to learn X, A, B, and C (I think that will take years) it has helped me realize that I am too focused on the big picture and need to take more time learning the smaller steps.

Reviewing everyone’s final projects during class last week helped me see that there were lots of small, yet important steps that could be taken to improve our sites. When I took on my final project, I was so focused on the final “update” or “addition” that I did not even consider smaller changes, yet I think the people who took on smaller projects had the most impressive final products.

Overall I know this class was an invaluable addition to my coursework. I still have a lot to learn and plan to practice via Codecademy and other sites so I can better understand the baby steps that will one day lead to the overarching objectives I hope to achieve in both my personal and professional work.

Final Project Edits And Final Thoughts

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I really enjoyed seeing everyone’s final projects last class — it felt good to know we all faced similar struggles and it was awesome to see the progress we all made.

This past week, I made a couple of changes to my final project based on feedback from my classmates, including more CSS code to change the color and look of my content. I added social media links to my footer and tackled – albeit unsuccessfully – the issue of my custom meta posts not showing up in my blog’s ‘archive’ and ‘recent posts’ sections. I was able to work around the problem with a plugin that allowed me to create separate ‘recent posts’ and ‘archive’ feeds for my book reviews. Although it’s not the solution I would have wanted, it will do for now. There are still things I’m not happy about with my site – in particular how my meta boxes and custom fields are functioning within my posts. I hope that as I continue working on the site, I can work through these issues.

Overall, I really enjoyed working on my final project. I’m pretty proud of my personal site; I’ve wanted to create one for a while so this was the perfect opportunity. To be able to say I coded some of it is an added bonus. Going forward, I would like to keep it up and continue making improvements to it.

Although I am by no means an expert coder, I’ve really enjoyed taking this class. It was definitely the most challenging course I’ve taken in the Georgetown program, but coming into the class with zero coding experience, I am really happy with how much I’ve learned these past couple of months. I enjoy coding and would like to be able to do it regularly in some capacity moving forward, even if it’s just making edits to my site.

I’m looking forward to listening to our guest speaker next class and hearing more from my peers regarding how their adjustments went.

Started From The Bottom, Now We’re Here

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It has been a wild summer semester. I walked into this class (a week late) with unknown expectations for the class, the semester, and the material. To be honest, my only interactions with code were back when we had AOL Instant Messenger and MySpace and I wanted to customize something on my profile. Now, after being able to take a step back, I feel like I have learned so much more. I definitely would not have been able to learn what I did if I attempted to learn code on my own–I need the hand holding at the beginning to get comfortable. While I still feel like a total noob when it comes to code and coding, I also feel a sense of accomplishment for being able to at least (somewhat) understand HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery and PHP, and being able to create my own site using developer code. Like, what?! I’ve realized that coding truly is another language and I have a greater appreciation for the internet, dynamic and interactive sites and most importantly the web developers on my team. I didn’t comprehend the work that goes into their daily tasks.

As I look back on the class I think there are a few things that I would change to help my fellow Georgetown students on their web developer journeys:

  • Offer this class during a Fall or Spring semester. I think the extra weeks and shorter class times will make all the difference.
  • Continue using Codecademy. I think that was my saving grace.
  • Start the WordPress project from the beginning. Find a way to incorporate the final project from the beginning.
  • Work through Codeacademy-like lessons together in class. W3Schools helped, but I think being hands on would be even better.

I really enjoyed this class. I feel a sense of pride knowing that I have made it out alive on the other side with only several bumps, bruises, and maybe a few tears later. I hope my coding journey doesn’t end here and that I’m able to continue learning and developing these skills, but more on that in the next post!

Oops I did it again

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Well, I didn’t realize I was supposed to write a post this week because I thought we only had to submit our final site. Whoops!

Ok, so this was truly a blood, sweat and tears process. I’ve learned that coding itself is really not that big of a deal, it’s the figuring out how it all strings together that’s the true challenge. I’m not going to lie, this was really hard for me, and I also had to put in hours upon hours of effort into figuring this out. For example, I spent about four hours just trying and failing to select the correct class to modify an element.

Honestly, in retrospect, I feel like I got hung up on your “don’t try and re-invent the wheel” comments, so if there was a plugin version to try, I would try that. But, I feel like I should’ve just started from scratch instead of wasting lots of time trying to figure out how to make tiny adjustments to the plugins and wading in horrible forums (why can’t everyone’s customer service be like Squarespace’s?). Master Slider is stupid and clunky.

But! The fact that I even got a website up in any capacity is sort of a miracle. This was such a maze of an experience. One step forward and fifteen steps back.

And, I am really looking forward to being able to putz around on my own time and make tweaks–and honestly just being able to do things without having to do anything in particular. Like, while this isn’t exactly what I pictured, it’s definitely closer than what I thought I’d end up with. It’s minimal, which I like. That’s definitely my style, and I love the idea of going to all the different tradesmen in Colonial Williamsburg and make slideshows for each of them. (Who knows what for, but I think it’d be fun.)

So. Whilst I plan to take a break from coding for a bit, I definitely want to continue working through projects and learning through that process.

This is the broccoli of classes.

A Life Surfeited

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A Life Surfeited

I chose the name of my blog with the intent to showcase the activity that fills my life with joy: travel. The past few weeks, however, it has applied more (unforgivingly) to the massive amount of work, homework, and just plain ole life on my plate. Juggling it all, but especially the creation of my final project, has been a lesson in patience and prioritizing. But like with most challenges, I have made it through and am now ready to start planning my next reprieve… a trip to SoCal!

I finally got my website up and running after way too many hours of googling fixes, installing, uninstalling, uploading, compressing, downloading, deleting, transferring, renaming, plugging in, unplugging, signing in, signing out, caching… you get the idea. I ended up having to add a plugin to my local WP site that copied everything and duplicated it on my live WP site (and somehow/somewhere saved it to a database.) I’m still unclear how to maintain the site, which I plan to do, but like everything else, will figure it out. I know we aren’t supposed to make changes to the live site, but just seems SO much easier for a personal blog (not a client site.) But I do want to follow best practices if I can figure out a relatively easy way to copy and duplicate going forward.

There are still many modifications I would like to make to my site, as well as content to be added – again, I plan to actually use and update my site going forward. But for now, I am happy with what I was able to accomplish.

I made quite a few style changes to the parent theme using a child theme, but also through the WP customization tool. A few things I want to do but was unable, after several searches and failed attempts, include:

  • Making the header menu background color (black) run the full length of the page. Right now it is cut up with a gray background. It has something to do with the layers on the page… a site container under another site container, with a row and a banner and a menu in between or over. So if I change one that may fix the header problem, if affects other parts of the page.
  • Make the text in the site container in the banner image more opaque without making the entire page (site container) opaque. Same issue with layering above.

I also modified three plugins to suit my needs: a Google calendar, a world map, and custom comment fields.

  • I am still working on the Google calendar – I have done every step the plugin says, i.e. created the cal, linked to my public Google cal, accessed an API key, but it still won’t display the “events.”
  • I am happy with the world map, as it links to associated posts, but I would like to continue playing with it’s styling.
  • As for the comment fields, I was able to create 2 new fields. One thing I still can’t figure out though is how to remove the WP default field for “Website.” It only shows for users not signed in, but still… I don’t want or need it.

Another thing I’d like to do in the future is make the information/links I have on my Day Dreams page, under the calendar, look like a Pinterest page. I think I will be able to do this, just need to find the right plugin.

Two last thoughts: I didn’t utilize widgets for my final project but would be interested in learning more about them and how I could. Also, I may decide to make a custom post type for my travel posts that include dates of the trip and location (instead of me having to remember to write that in each time.)

So yea, I think that’s it! Way to go everyone! We did it! I look forward to seeing everyone’s blogs this week in class:)

Cheers,

Jane

Getting My Metadata to Save (FINALLY) and Finishing My Site

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This week, I spent entirely too much time time trying to get custom metabox data to save and echo to the body of my custom post type. We are talking hours and days here. On Wednesday night after class, I had a breakthrough, and found a block of code online that I modeled my custom post type plugin code after. I was able to get the data in my four custom fields (neighborhood, date, time, and distance) to save when I click publish on the post editor screen. However, I still can’t get the data to echo to my custom post despite playing around with the content.php, single.php, and content-single.php templates in my child theme. When playing around with these template files, I got the data to echo both above and below the post content, but not in the box that holds the post content itself. Very frustrating. I decided that simply saving this metadata is enough, since it’s more of a backend customization anyways and is used for my personal tracking purposes.

I also worked hard this week at creating content for my live site. The realization that I had to write several posts by Sunday was helpful in terms of holding me accountable to actually go running.

In last week’s blog post, Jane mentioned that she was using the projects feature in GitHub to track her progress, and I thought this was a great idea. I started using this feature and created a to-do list and completed modifications list, both of which I used to track my progress on my site customizations.

Speaking of site customizations, I updated my pitch post to remove the lightbox gallery modification that I had hoped to create, and I updated a few of my other modifications to reflect the fact that I ended up using existing WordPress plugins for those (Strava widget, contact form). I’m hoping that the modifications that I was able to complete — creating a child theme and customizing CSS styles (fonts, colors), creating a custom post type plugin with categories, rendering a custom meta box, and rendering four custom fields and saving the metadata — will be enough.

Overall, this was a productive week. I’m glad to be “done” with my site, and am looking forward to seeing everyone else’s projects on Wednesday.

The Final Stretch

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This week I found myself feeling satisfied and relieved to be taking a break from coding my final project. I went into the last class knowing that I wanted to complete a few tweaks to my WordPress site, wanted to collaborate with my classmates on figuring out the final pieces of code, and coming to terms that I don’t fully understand why my code doesn’t always work. I found myself Googling more than I had anticipated that I would be, and I relied heavily on a number of PHP and CSS code testers to be test my code. At times, I was confused as to if I was making updates to my local or live site…I have a case of “too many tabs open at one time” syndrome. In a way, it was good. It forced me restart my thinking from scratch and gave me a minute to walk away from the code.

Admittedly, I have grown frustrated with the Final Project. I had a feeling I would. I spent SOOOOO many hours trying to get all of the custom post types to work, then getting the meta boxes to work. The frustration quickly turned to anger. I’d be ecstatic if someone could look at my code and find how to improve it so it could echo the information correctly (or at all) the actual post.

Another major shout out to everyone in class the other day. Thanks for helping answer all of my questions!

I’m happy to be able to take a step back from the code. My plan is to quickly jump back into my WordPress site and continuously develop the site, content, and my coding skills. I hope to be able to go back to Code Academy and re-work on the lessons at a slower pace to allow me to soak in the information.

Onward and upward. I hope everyone enjoys the site.

Github: https://github.com/amaliaks/Final_Project_Amalia

Site: http://threecheersfourfood.com/

What a Relief

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After sacrificing many hours and most of my weekend, I think my site is finally in solid shape. If I feel the need, I might add some more modifications to my page but I am now confident I have done my best and finished all I need to do.

This was such a challenging assignment. I had no idea what to do most of the time since I have never been a computer science person. Looking back, it always feels rewarding to be finished because you know you have worked hard for something.

After completing the project bit-by-bit, I have made modifications that were different from my original pitch, which I need to go back and change. Here are some of the things I did for my website:

  • I coded in several images (our firm’s logo and our podcasting logo) and added the images to my WordPress admin.
  • I did some HTML and CSS.
  • I finished a JavaScript slideshow.
  • I embedded several SoundCloud codes.   

Overall, it was so cool to see the final product. Some things I forgot to do was constantly commit to GitHub as I made modifications, but all my code should now be on GitHub. If I make any more modifications, I’ll probably add some of our social media plugins and a contact form, but I wanted to make sure to focus on what I had so far and making it look as nice as possible.

It was tricky doing everything. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the project. More likely than not, my boss will have feedback for me as we continue growing our podcast division, but I’m proud of what I have done so far and know I did my absolute best.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s projects and getting others’ feedback.

URL: http://wmgpodcasters.com

GitHub: https://github.com/ibasco/wmgpodcasters