What I'm most excited for this year:
Another great year in a great house with a great dog and a host of great friends and family coming and going. Here's to wassail!
Learning even more about coding and web development: currently taking a Udacity Mobile Web course online and a Python course through Girl Develop It (who are awesome) "irl". I can never decide if using "irl" makes me sound like I'm stuck somewhere in ICQ circa 1998 or like I'm an awesome text-savvy social media user not a day over 25. Hmmmm...
Ramping up career from intern/learner/networker/experimenter to full-time-employee/learner/networker/experimenter. Hint, hint.
And in case you were wondering how long I would go with just "the girl the dog", I am finally being well-distracted from my increasing nerdiness on weekends by, you guessed, it, "the boyfriend"(!!!). So that is one other, non-code-related item that turns out to make everything in this new year just that much brighter.
Happy New Year!
Monday, January 6, 2014
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Christmas is over. So why haven't I taken down my extraordinary (pink) Christmas tree? If the preceeding question doesn't answer itself, then we have nothing left to talk about.
But I wanted to explain (read: brag about) my awesome side projects (Christmas presents) that were done in addition to completing a quarter at school and setting up an entirely new website at the internship (to go live sometime this month!).
First challenge: A "Worry Wart" website for Mom/every woman in the world to store worries for them. This needed a database, tables interacting with each other, a somewhat secure way to access, read, and write to the database, login, log out, create a new user, store session variables, count worries that came true vs worries that never happened, add and delete worries. Whew! I think that might be about it.
If you're interested, check out worrywart.jessicawicksnin.com. If you're really interested, check out my code on git hub (jwicksnin).
Second challenge: A "Benjamin Speaks" app for Dad/every retirement-savvy person to aid them in financial decision making. This took CSS to create a neat shadowed "quote bubble" and awesome jQuery to take a submitted question, find a suitable (random) answer in a text file, and output the random answer. Nothing too fancy, but the image of a $100 bill that I gleaned from Google addressing my dad directly is really cute.
Third challenge: A "Facebook for Two" for my boyfriend/every couple who too busy actually having a relationship "IRL" to document every stage of their relationship on actual Facebook. This took some serious JavaScript because a text file wasn't good enough - I was determined to use the word AJAX as much as possible. I ended up using a quick PHP file to write from JavaScript to the existing XML file on the server. So now I feel very comfortable reading and writing XML files based on user input via AJAX requests. It's basically a poorly-styled Facebook, which made me question the value of Facebook at $100,000(?) a share if I can build the same thing in a couple weeks with nothing but Google and Web Programming Step by Step (thank you CSE at UW) for help.
But I wanted to explain (read: brag about) my awesome side projects (Christmas presents) that were done in addition to completing a quarter at school and setting up an entirely new website at the internship (to go live sometime this month!).
First challenge: A "Worry Wart" website for Mom/every woman in the world to store worries for them. This needed a database, tables interacting with each other, a somewhat secure way to access, read, and write to the database, login, log out, create a new user, store session variables, count worries that came true vs worries that never happened, add and delete worries. Whew! I think that might be about it.
If you're interested, check out worrywart.jessicawicksnin.com. If you're really interested, check out my code on git hub (jwicksnin).
Second challenge: A "Benjamin Speaks" app for Dad/every retirement-savvy person to aid them in financial decision making. This took CSS to create a neat shadowed "quote bubble" and awesome jQuery to take a submitted question, find a suitable (random) answer in a text file, and output the random answer. Nothing too fancy, but the image of a $100 bill that I gleaned from Google addressing my dad directly is really cute.
Third challenge: A "Facebook for Two" for my boyfriend/every couple who too busy actually having a relationship "IRL" to document every stage of their relationship on actual Facebook. This took some serious JavaScript because a text file wasn't good enough - I was determined to use the word AJAX as much as possible. I ended up using a quick PHP file to write from JavaScript to the existing XML file on the server. So now I feel very comfortable reading and writing XML files based on user input via AJAX requests. It's basically a poorly-styled Facebook, which made me question the value of Facebook at $100,000(?) a share if I can build the same thing in a couple weeks with nothing but Google and Web Programming Step by Step (thank you CSE at UW) for help.
Life Without Plugins
Here are some things I heart doing in WordPress:
Creating new custom post types without a plugin
Creating custom fields (i.e. meta boxes) without a plugin
Creating widgets without a plugin
Editing post types and widgets without a plugin
Importing styles without a plugin
Hmmm.. do we see a pattern emerging? Somewhere in the past month or so I think I may have made friends with WordPress, because lately, instead of hunting through files for hours looking for one certain variable, I'm able to blow through a "To Do" list and continue to be amazed when my first or second attempt simply works.
And I've decided that I definitely belong to the "less is more" camp when it comes to plugins. Especially since we have multiple users and developers and who knows who doing who knows what on the admin side, keeping plugins like Custom Post Type at a minimum is essential to make sure that changes to the functionality of the site are only done by someone relatively qualified. As we learned on the current (old) site, even something simple like slug, category, and page names can wreak havoc on something as major as permalinks and redirects. Isn't that the point of WordPress, to make content easy to add and change without having to affect code?
Here are some awesome things I've done recently sans plugin:
Creating new custom post types without a plugin
Creating custom fields (i.e. meta boxes) without a plugin
Creating widgets without a plugin
Editing post types and widgets without a plugin
Importing styles without a plugin
Hmmm.. do we see a pattern emerging? Somewhere in the past month or so I think I may have made friends with WordPress, because lately, instead of hunting through files for hours looking for one certain variable, I'm able to blow through a "To Do" list and continue to be amazed when my first or second attempt simply works.
And I've decided that I definitely belong to the "less is more" camp when it comes to plugins. Especially since we have multiple users and developers and who knows who doing who knows what on the admin side, keeping plugins like Custom Post Type at a minimum is essential to make sure that changes to the functionality of the site are only done by someone relatively qualified. As we learned on the current (old) site, even something simple like slug, category, and page names can wreak havoc on something as major as permalinks and redirects. Isn't that the point of WordPress, to make content easy to add and change without having to affect code?
Here are some awesome things I've done recently sans plugin:
- Sort posts alphabetically and by custom field (meta) value
- Create new custom post types loosely based on existing custom post types
- Trick WordPress into not pre-prending the entire blog url to an inputed url (http://www.google.com as opposed to http://www.myblog.com/category/www.google.com)
- Even though the current theme relies on an icon library linked to CSS rules like "content: /e701"; to display sociable icons (instead of using separate icon files), maintain the styles for the icon library while using my own sociable icon not included in the library. Sort of hacky, totally awesome. This took CSS, PHP, Wordpress, and icon library know-how.
- Formatting widgets in the admin side and how they are displayed on the live site.
Needless to say, over the past four months I have become 200% more comfortable and confident with WordPress. If I had a few extra hours each day, I would start working on my own theme. However, I don't have a few extra hours, but not that Christmas presents are done (!!!) maybe I can carve a few out.
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