Blog

Milestone One

So I decided to do a summary that coincided with the Milestones, instead of a weekly update. I hope that was okay!

WordPress seems simple enough when it comes to just working on adding elements and altering to fit your needs. I have played around in much simpler websites, such as Canva, Wix, Weebly, Carrd.co. When I mention these are simple set up they really are. Some even have limitations to the elements you can add.

PHP was interesting to read about! A lot of it reminded me of Java and C++ that I have already taken. The concepts of how the coding structure worked. Only thing I didn't think about was implementing it within my code as I worked on this website.

Getting WordPress set up was more of a nightmare than I thought it would be! After a few days of trying to figure out what I was doing wrong I looked up a youtube tutorial to walk me through it. After following the videos sets to set it up on the browser I was relieved. But the ability to set WordPress up Locally didn't seem to have the same options as the Youtube video I found nor the tutorial placed within our reading. Hopefully I can get that set up at some point. . .

Navigation within the WordPress dashboards are very confusing. It seems as if there are three different dashboards you could be in at any given moment. Depending on which dashboard you are on it will give slightly different options. I can already tell that I will get mixed up with what page I am on very often. I've already ran into a block where I installed one plugin and cannot find where to add more. . . Um. . . yeah I don't know what dashboard I was on to get to the Add new plugin page.

Wireframes are a wonderful thing to have. It makes visualizing your website better! I think my biggest problem is figuring out what I want on each page. Given the nature of my project I have so many thoughts but nothing has settled. Things might come together better come time to build the website.

Migrating on to week 4's reading. I remember a lot of this from 110, but I greatly enjoyed getting the refresher! I do remember that getting the order of operations correct when doing some of the more direct calls was confusing and still is just a little bit.

I don't have too much to say about this section as I mainly was reading.

This was a very information heavy chapter. I accidentally read all of the Cocktail Dress first and then moved to the full Ballgown section...I wish I had broken it up like it shows in the reading list.
This was a very information heavy chapter. I accidentally read all of the Cocktail Dress first and then moved to the full Ballgown section...I wish I had broken it up like it shows in the reading list.

I will say at this point I missed the live demos of the new things we learned. I didn't have the time to sit and play with all of the fancy new elements I learned in this chapter but I hope to be able to when time comes or just at a later date. I feel like some of this will make me frustrated when I begin to use it. But it will be so satisfying when it all clicks.

During the last reading, I don't know why but when reading this is when flex box finally clicked for me. I found it extremely hard to visualize something I couldn't physically see while working. So I had the idea to just put a border around the container class/id. I hope this helps me when I start to work on my webpage.

One thing that is growing increasingly frustrating with WordPress is that I can't set my own colors to work from. This way I don't have to use the color slide to get to the color I want each time nor do I have to grab the Hex code from another text block to use. Unless I haven't found the feature where it stores your last used color yet. But I grow agitated.

Milestone Three

I have not had the time as much as I would like to for working with WordPress. I got sick with the Flu during Spring Break when I wanted to get myself back on track. That didn't happen.

Life got a bit hectic around this time and I had no time for anything other than trying to keep my mental health inline as much as possible. But here are some random things I played with on WordPress.

*Note, I use CTRL+Z a LOT and this site snaps in weird places when you CTRL+Z. There are some small nuances that bother me.

I played with WordPress as seen on the screen shots before

While I understand a lot of this is to be preformed through CSS and is meant to only assist in creating a site and not make it easy peasy. But it is very upsetting that I could preform something of this nature on a less intuitive site and have a less frustrating time in setting it up to then alter it later.

Taking this image grid for example. I went to do some alterations thinking that it would alter each individual square but no it alters the whole thing. If I have the option to choose hover and add a color to it I would like to do it and not get a blob of a white box in the background.

Like...WordPress do better. Also I get this is a blog page that I chose to do this on but could we have more than on layout for a blog page please WordPress?

Milestone Four

By this time I had rethought the layout for my site. I still wasn't 100% certain what I even wanted to do for the full site as there are a lot of things to consider when putting together a site like this.

My biggest grip would be trying to scrape everything together from scratch. BUT when I was playing with certain things of WordPress things were not laying as I had hoped they would. WordPress made the task even more temperamental than I had hoped it would. It is not the easiest site to learn how to use in a semester.

When I was working on setting up WordPress I couldn't for the life of me get it to set up locally. The download that is present on the tutorial is not present any longer. It has you download an OVA file which requires you to download something else to open it. And I didn't understand how to work that even after looking up multiple videos. So I scrapped it, I tried to just work with the tutorials while not having the local WordPress present. I believe that I needed to have the local installed so that the theme would properly update as I went along. During both video's I noticed that I needed to have copied part of the local page and pasted it into a certain area for it to update as changes were made. Since I never could get the local to download properly for me I couldn't see what was happening fully on my site.

Finding the files that tutorials spoke about, was difficult! The folders aren't named the same nor are they in the same order. After adding the file to the main and importing the file I kept getting an error that it couldn't find the files. How and why I don't know given that I followed the tutorial the best that I could.

Working on something completely new and trying to understand it within the last few weeks was very difficult. Having the implementation of this along with the readings at the beginning of the semester would have been a lot better. Having a very condensed amount of information and also having to worry about getting my project in within a timely manner stressed me out to no end along with other classes homework to do. Even with having some time back under control you still need time and patients when doing any type of coding. I know I am not the best when it comes to asking for help on things, I'm stubborn and believe I can figure it out on my own. Nope that didn't happen this go around.

While this is an independent class and we can venture anywhere at any point in time. I feel having the ending tutorials placed closer to the beginning/middle of the class vs the very end would help make a difference. I wish I had tackled these earlier in the semester so I did ask for help but life happened for me and I didn't have the time like I wanted mid way through my semester. That being said, I say this because making a website in itself already takes the time and patients then I have to quickly learn and understand this new stuff and I'm learning something that I don't want to use on my page so I can't implement as I go. Which then learning takes up time and trying to implement what you learned on top also takes up time.

Phi is an interesting measurement that was introduced during the Just Add Style tutorial section. I also do love the aspect that the customs_styles file import brings to the page. This does make it a lot easier to alter things at once vs having to change it in one area and then edit it again in another etc.. One down side to not being able to get the local WordPress to download is that I do have to refresh my browser to see the updates. Even though I have it on a new theme based off the tutorials the very first theme I started with remains present.

Another thing I noticed while typing is that pressing Enter to go to another line just exits you from the block of text you are typing in. It's the small things that matter truly. I did have a great struggle trying to just import a full HTML/CSS file and not worry about the WordPress. Even more of a time when I found out my Plugin stopped giving me the function to get to my plugins. So that was lovely.

I think with more time and less of life getting in the way I would have enjoyed working on this project a lot more. Even in the end I still enjoyed working on the code even if not on WordPress but from scratch. Putting together my understanding of certain elements better helped that a lot.

I will continue to work on getting better with web design and hopefully one day you will be looking at a website I have built!

Thank you so much for being an amazing teacher! I do apologize for how hectic my life god within these few months and it did impact my ability to work on this project like I originally wanted to.