Tag Archives: week10

Getting Back in Order

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After what was a tumultuous couple of weeks for me, personally and academically, I am starting to feel like I’m getting back into a productive groove. With scheduling and organizing it feels good to feel at least somewhat on top of my work.

So I’ve truly begun the process of starting to find modifications that I would be interested in applying to my final project. The contact form example that we worked on was very interesting me, although it may seem like a basic part of an e-portfolio, it helped narrow the scope to things that I deemed to be practical. I’m thinking maybe leaving a comments box on the page could be a plausible idea. Hopefully I can come up with a few more ideas to solidify my modifications and then from there I can put them and motion and get my web portfolio up and running.

The readings this week were informative. I was confused watching the API video, but the article helped to break down the term piece by piece. This is a modification I could see wanting to put on my website. The possibility of being able to schedule an interview or something else through the website could prove to be useful.

Week 10: Still Trying To Understand How the Web Works

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APIs — Application Programming Interfaces — are waiters. What does that mean exactly? Well, MuleSoft explains it like a restaurant. You sit down at your table, persuing the various delicacies available for your choosing. You know the kitchen will be able to make your order, but how do you let the kitchen know what you want? And how does the kitchen get you your food? Surely, you can’t do it yourself so this is waiters (or APIs) come in. An API is a messenger that takes requests and tells a system what you want to do. Then, the API will return the response back to you.

Real API examples are third-party travel sites. When you use services such as Kayak or Priceline, they are interacting with airlines’ and hotels’ APIs. You tell them what you want, they tell the companies, and then they give you the companies’ responses.

In essence, APIs rule the internet. The web (did I use those right??) would be far less connected that what we see today. They connect the web, allowing developers, applications, and sites to tap into databases and services (or, assets)—much like open-source software. APIs do this by acting like a universal converter plug offering a standard set of instructions.

Get it? Got it? Good! Now you have a basic (emphasis on basic) understanding of how APIs work. You can try out our example below to get a better understanding of the mechanics behind APIs or watch our video about getting started with APIs.

Click the button to go to the next lesson!

 

Click Here for "REST APIs & JSON"—>

 

Side note: often on like third-party travel sites, there aren’t Southwest flights. I usually use Google Flights, so I can’t speak for everyone, but does that mean Southwest doesn’t allow third-party access to their APIs? And what would be the motive for doing so?

Thoughts and Questions

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The project has been finicky, but things are rolling right along.

I’m worried about being able to successfully manipulate the slider plugin I’ve chosen, “MasterSlider”–it’s kind of fussy. I’ll go in to change certain things and then the changes don’t show up. (Edit: I sent them a message to ask a question, but they didn’t reply until about five days later. So. A note for customer service via WordPress plugins!)

I’m also concerned about each of the pictures being the correct size, so that they aren’t totally blown out of proportion or blurry or some such. I’m having trouble finding a way to make them “full screen” without them being totally blown out of proportion. Honestly, in retrospect, it might be helpful to build the slider completely from scratch, but at this point I simply don’t have time.

My final finicky issue is the text, which is somewhat related to the picture issues. Again, with the slider plugin I downloaded I should be able to add text directly to each slide, but it’s not working. So, I’ve gone in to another application in an effort to add text over the slides. But, I think it looks sort of clunky. And there aren’t good options for text overlay so that they’ll be able to show up over the pictures.

I also had to go in and resize each picture individually through a data compressor type thing I found online, because each picture was too big for the WordPress media library. Another frustration, but I think I’ve found a solution without having to compromise the quality of the photographs.

Continued (Slow) Progress on the Site & Lots of Trial and Error

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This week I was so enthralled in writing my code I forgot to write an analysis post! I spent most of my day Saturday and Sunday working on my code and, although we are getting closer to a working product, I am definitely not as far along with my assignment as I usually am a week out for the due date. I have spent hours researching, testing code, trying new approaches, and reading about different WordPress features that may serve a helpful purpose, but there are still a few pieces of my site that I can’t get functioning properly!

Specifically, on my “Request a Recipe” form, I was able to get it working perfectly on my local site (woohoo!) but now the form is not appearing on my live site. I have downloaded the necessary plug-in, triple checked the theme I created, ensured the permalink is accurately linked, and yet the form will not appear on the site. I am sure I will dance around the room when I finally figure out how to make this work, but at the moment it is very frustrating and disheartening because after hours of work, I am no closer to a solution. On the slideshow front, I have found a great tutorial on the code that I am currently working through (the four previous tutorials I tried to follow lost me half way through the programming) and although I have not finalized the slideshow, I am hopeful I will be able to achieve my goal! I am proud of what I have accomplished thus far and do feel like I have learned a LOT through trial and error, I just wish the hours I have put into the site were more apparent in the final product.

I think one of the frustrating things for me was realizing that some of the work I did on my home site did not function properly on my live site due to technical changes (e.g. I wrote my child theme based on the theme my local site was using, not the updated theme I picked for my live site) this meant I had to update all the content and repeat a lot of work I had already done, which made sense logically once I realized the issue, but was frustrating in the moment. I think this project has been a steep learning curve, but it has forced me to learn a lot about WordPress layout, functionality, local sites versus live sites, plugins, bugs and site testing, and several other odds and ends that I did not expect to understand in such a short period of time. Hopefully I will have a fabulously functioning website by this time next week, but if not, at least I’ve learned a lot!

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!

Final Project Update

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Working on the project for the past week, I’ve been able to tick off a couple of the customizations on my list: I’ve created a custom post type for my book reviews, created hierarchies to sort the posts by genres and authors, and created a custom meta box for rating each book. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to have the data from the meta box save and display on my posts. I am rating the books from one to ten, and, so far, the number I enter stays in the box after I’ve saved and hit publish but doesn’t show up when I preview the post. I’ve been adapting the code from the book list plug-in, which has been a lifesaver, and I’m not sure where I’m going wrong. I’ve looked at various tutorials but none of them have worked for me. I know Jaclyn was having a similar problem with her meta boxes, so maybe we can troubleshoot that together on Wednesday.

I would like to make more edits to my custom post type, including creating a subtitle custom field where I can post my favorite quote. I’ve downloaded the advanced custom fields plug-in but am having a little trouble navigating how to use it.

I would like to use this to also add a “Currently Reading” custom field to my regular (non-custom) posts. I’ve managed to get a “Currently Reading” section to appear on my posts but am not sure how to get the data in it to display when I publish. I’ve been using this tutorial, which tells me you have to put code into the WordPress Loop. I’ve tried to create a loop in my child theme folder so I can insert the code to make the field display (since I know we’re not supposed to touch the core files) but keep getting errors.

I also tested dropping my files into FileZilla this weekend and got it to work (I think) – it was cool to see my custom post type appear on my live site!

I’m hoping to wrap up work on my custom post type before Wednesday and spend the second part of the week focusing on my second big customization: creating a custom poll to have visitors interact with my site and choose what book I read next.

I am crossing my fingers that I will have enough time to get everything done and that the customizations I finish will be enough.

Google Everything

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This week I definitely saw a shift in my learning as we continued to work on and finalize our finished websites. I struggled throughout the weekend but working with a study group was definitely helpful, and as I was able to work through the small tasks I had set for myself, I gained confidence in what I was able to not only understand, but also accomplish.

During the rest of this week up until my final project is due, I hope to put the last final touches on my content and then make sure it is displayed and running to the best of my ability. I’m still not totally sure if the number of customizations needed will suffice for the assignment (and is probably my greatest concern before we turn in our GitHub links on Sunday) but I’m sure hoping! I’ve also noticed that using our Google group email has been really great, since its much easier to respond back and read questions and answers in a timely fashion that can sometimes help inform what we’re already working on.

I also totally agree with Molly’s last comment about Codecademy – they were super helpful in learning the languages, but since we learned HTML and CSS (my two most comfortable languages — maybe because they are the simplest for me?) in the first two weeks of class, I could definitely use a refresher on syntax. I may go back and try to relearn at least those two languages post-finals, if possible.

 

 

Much busier week

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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!