I’ve come pretty close to getting my website to look and function the way I want it too.  Using plugins I was able to create simple galleries for my posts, allow star ratings for certain parts of my posts when I want my users to rate something, and I gave myself the ability to post with footnotes. Much of my writing tends to be filled with “bonus” information that I feel enhances the post but doesn’t contribute to the coherence of the main article (aka I get sidetracked really easily and don’t want my readers to miss out on extra content just because it doesn’t go well with the rest of the post), so footnotes were key.

I finally figured out how to get my header to fill the top of the screen, and there are a few other styling things I want to do, but I’m happy that it doesn’t look too much like the original Twenty-Twelve theme.  Eventually I want it to be unrecognizable, similar to the way that AMCtv.com and some of the other great WordPress sites are.  The tough part here will not only just be the design (I’m not much of an artist, so I’ll probably be borrowing a lot of styling from other sites) and keeping the site optimized for mobile.  While I’ve got the site looking good for computer users, it looks downright terrible on my phone.  I’ve found some good tools for testing live sites for mobile, but I already have an iPhone and could do it on my own.  I need to find a tool that lets me test my local site on a mobile emulator, because I don’t want to have to keep updating my live site just to see if it is optimized for local.

It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the night trying to fix what has been plaguing me: custom meta boxes.  I’ve been through three different tutorials, and still can’t get my custom box to appear.  That the last real functionality piece that I need, but it’s also the one that’s been giving me the most trouble from the start.

I can’t believe it’s already time to present our sites. In nine weeks, I went from knowing very little about web development to having a fully functioning website. Not only is the visible aspect of the site gratifying, but having knowledge about the “behind the scenes” coding and application part (MAMP, GitHub, GoDaddy and Cyberduck) is just as rewarding.

Last week I felt pretty good about my site – the functionality was complete, all I had left to do was add some content via my custom post type (CPT). When I began adding posts, however, I quickly realized that my site was not “calling” my CPT posts – it was only calling the generic posts built into the theme. After some good-old Codex research and collaborating with Charlotte, we discovered that we needed to add a filter that would “get my CPT posts.” Four lines of code later, we got it to work – but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

In addition to creating my CPT called ‘wine,’ I created two custom taxonomy categories (region and year). The plan was to have each post searchable by year or region. While my CPT and taxonomies were showing up just fine in the Admin for last few weeks, I realized this weekend that only my ‘region’ taxonomy works properly in the actual posts. This was very frustrating because I created the region and year taxonomy the Exact. Same. Way. Trust me, I looked at this code for about two hours yesterday.

At this stage of the game, I decided to delete the ‘year’ category and just roll with the ‘region’ category. I plan on troubleshooting the problem again because having the ‘year’ category would be nice, but since our sites are due today, I decided it’s better to have the site working without the additional taxonomy than having a malfunctioning site.

Looking back at my initial pitch, my site is pretty much on par with what I set out to accomplish. But, now that I know substantially more about coding/programming than I did back then, I wish I had time to do more. I’m looking forward to further developing my site, but for now, I’m at happy place.

Excited to see everyone’s sites on Tuesday!

Advice for next time: Always check that your theme is supported by ALL browsers. I learned the hard way that my theme (Magazine Basic) is not supported by Chrome, so please view in Firefox or Safari.

It is interesting to look back on previous posts and see what my expectations were at the beginning of the semester were, and comparing them to what I have accomplished today. I was ambitious and definitely overestimated my own future abilities but overall I would say I did ok. We have talked quite a bit this semester about how learning to code is an ongoing process that takes time and serious amounts of practice/effort. Putting a deadline on it means that some things will get done, others probably not. At the end of the day I like my website but know that with more time I could have tweaked it just a little bit more. Obviously these are things that I can still do, just not before the deadline or for my web development class grade.

By this time last week I thought I was done with coding. All I had to do was insert content and voila, the website was done. However, things don’t always turn out the way we think they will. In class I left an extra space at the bottom of my php file which crashed my entire website. Once this was solved, the code I added to make my custom post type file properly under categories was glitchy and I couldn’t figure out the problem. Being a visual person I have a hard time wrapping my mind around concepts when I read them. I need to discuss them and see someone physically show them to me. This made solving the glitch difficult since I knew the project was due before I would see anyone else from class, or really anyone in my life who might have had the proper knowledge to help explain the problem to me. With the final deadline was approaching I decided to circumvent using categories and figure out the problem at another time, one when I am not facing a time crunch.

We have all been working on our projects in class and yet, I have no idea what other people’s pages look like! I’m excited to check them out and see how the ideas we discussed during circle time back in May take shape on everyone’s websites.