Obligatory New Year's Post

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!

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.

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:

• 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.

How To Install New WordPress Site Locally Using MAMP: First Lap

Finally! Something that might actually be useful for someone.

My issues before installing:
Had some weird old Wordpress install that needed to be uninstalled:
Step One: Delete all "wordpress" folders from the Mac
Step Two: Delete ("drop") all related databases (not tables) from PHPMyAdmin
Step Three: Clear browser cache (maybe not necessary, but why not)

Had been traumatized by previous half-baked WordPress install:
Step One: Consult an actual WordPress book (I chose "Smashing WordPress" 3rd Ed by Hedengren).
Step Two: Read at least three different places in the WordPress codex about installing WordPress locally via MAMP.

Now that my "baggage" had been resolved, I moved onto the actual re-install.

Step One: Identify where you want the new site to reside.  This can be anywhere.  Using MAMP Preferences, under "Apache",  browse to your designated folder.  Wait for the servers to connect.

Step Two: Download WordPress.

Step Three: Copy and paste the downloaded "wordpress" folder into your designated folder that MAMP is using.


OK.  Seems easy enough. At this point, I pointed my browser to localhost and of course it didn't work automatically.  Instead, it complained about my lack of wp-config file.

Now, me and the config file go waaay back. So I felt prepared to make the following changes:
Step One: Open the provided wp-config-sample.php files and change all the DB_NAME settings to whatever is easiest for you to remember.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database name');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'yourname');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');


Step Two: Go to PHPMyAdmin.  Create a new database with the same name you just put into the config file.  Create a user with all privileges whose username and password matches the config file.  Make sure the user's host is "localhost" specifically.




Step Three: Copy and paste new values from the api.wordpress.org secret key salt page into config (not necessary for security on a local site, but since this will eventually go live, again, why not?).
Step Four: Change the name of the file to wp-config.php and save.

At this point I pointed my browser to http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and lo and behold, it now prompted me to create my user account and name the site!  Woot woot!

Four on the Floor

If you want a real thrill, try making changes to a live WordPress site after a recent deployment and numerous unknown changes by a third party half an hour before marketing needs the updated site for a client meeting...

Yes, this is what has happened to me, not once, but twice in the past two weeks!  We find ourselves bereft of a relevant testing environment, in the midst of trying to create local testing environments and a subdomain environment in addition to github.  However, before all of those dev environments got set up correctly, we had to debug a few items from the recent re-deployment/migration.

Step One: Change the featured image for a page so Facebook gets it right, and break the site!  Okay, the whole site didn't break, but we suddenly lost the very page we were trying to fix.  Lost as in it didn't display AND we couldn't find the file on the FTP.  Upon trying to move the local version of the file, we found we suddenly didn't have permissions to change that directory. Enter "Sam", in charge of recent re-deployment, who enlightened us to the fact that after the deployment, "Owner" of most files and directories had changed to "Apache" from "Our Organization".  After changing the ownership back, we were able to get the file back on the website, the page worked again, AND I figured out how to get Facebook to display the correct thumbnail for the specific page using their "developer" documentation.  Actually, some of the better documentation I've seen (including you, WordPress).

Step Two: Unable to upload images through the wp-admin screen.  Attempted to deactivate and reactivate a few plugins, as recommended in the aforementioned WordPress documentation, and lo and behold half of the styling for the site was lost!  Oh my!  At this point I literally had to sit down because I had no clue what the problem was or how to fix it.  Before restoring a backup of the whole site (I know, I know, stop panicking, Jessica), I fished around the office for some help from other developers not working on this specific site.

After some handy "inspection of element", we discovered the essential css had been lost.  Part of the problem was that we were used to using the Appearance --> Edit CSS part of the Jetpack plugin to easily add and override CSS.  Probably not the cleanest or most efficient, but since the site has dozens of style.css files, this seemed like the intuitive choice.  Some mysterious element called "Custom CSS" had disappeared from the site quite a while ago, as we saw from a recent download of the site to my computer.  So we went back to the now defunct test site, went into Edit CSS, copied the whole file, pasted into the theme's style.css with a few "!important"s thrown in for good measure, and lo and behold the style came back and two hours later I was exactly where I'd started.  I was beginning to feel like the only thing I could accomplish was not making the site worse, and if it was the same at the end of the day as at the beginning of the day, then I was doing well.  Sheesh.

Needless to say, these are not the best nor permanent fixes.  I would love to be able to test the site back into normal health, but ironically that is proving more difficult than it seems since every attempt as creating a new testing site under a subdomain manages to somehow, you guessed it, break part of the live site.

Things I have learned:

• WordPress is not simple.  It is complicated and often unpredictable.  Especially plugins.
• Don't feel brave.  Instead, make a backup, then try the very smallest change possible.
• Sites break every day.  Today just happens to be your day.  Tomorrow will be someone else's.
• An efficient, intuitive testing system must be setup when the site is created.  Unless you want a site that never changes ever again. 
• The database(s) in WordPress are essential.  Even though they may appear "black box" like, take them into consideration when creating backups, development sites, and local versions.  Learn to work with and love them, not ignore and delegate them. 

Happiness Is a Warm Doggie in Your Lap

Being winter (it's late October in Seattle - don't kid yourself that there are more than two seasons here), I'm cold almost all the time.  It doesn't help that I'm an environmentalist (read: cheapskate) who keeps the heat set at 65 degrees during the day when normal people are at work. Luckily, working on programming (I own you, Google Apps Script!) and programming classes, I have two things to keep me warm: a computer and a doggie, both competing for lap space in the big chairs in the living room.

Annie wants to dominate the computer, so she licks it.  Surprisingly, dog saliva only seems to make computers work better, not worse, since whenever she licks it, I solve some other programming problem.  As that beer commercial says, It's only weird if it doesn't work.  And I didn't even have to grill a quinoa burger.

If you'd like to see exactly how I dominated Google Apps Script, please check out my code on github (jwicksnin).  Here's a quick rundown:

After creating a script to send emails with the current user address, and send responses to another spreadsheet, I now have an app that...

• Creates a button on the spreadsheet for any user send a reminder email
• In the background, onclick, the script compares the original spreadsheet names with the responses spreadsheet.
• Flattening an array of both spreadsheets' names, finds those who haven't responded.
• Sends a reminder email similar to the original email to those who haven't responded yet. 
• Makes a very merry January for donors who receive gift baskets after confirming their mailing addresses.

Pretty awesome!  Now people at work won't even have to know about the scripts in order to use them. And that, after all, just might be the mark of a good computer program.

Oh No You Didn't, Google!

Yes, I am aware that I'm writing this on blogger, officially Google app/program/property/whatever.  But the attitude alluded to in the post title is good attitude - I have discovered Google's best-kept-secret.  Okay, maybe you knew about it, but I guarantee that other guy over there didn't.

If you liked Google Drive and Apps, you will love this.  They made up their own cryptic JavaScript dialect so you, yes you, can affect the functionality of your Google Docs.

For example, I was tasked with creating a Google Form to email to clients to confirm their mailing addresses so we can mail them holiday gifts.  Sounds simple enough - Google Forms as it is allows you to put the form in an email, a link to the form in an email, and embed the form in your own website.  Then the results are put into a spreadsheet of your choosing.  Wow!

But... when we decided to pre-populate the form with the addresses we had on file and clients could then either edit and submit, or approve and submit the address instead of having to enter the address all over again, well, it got complicated.  Suddenly, I needed some way to take data from the existing address spreadsheet, put those values into a form as values, then put that form into an email.  Sounds awesome, but as with many awesome things, easier said than done.

(I might mention that in the middle of this project I got a little frustrated and decided I needed a "win", however small, and so put a favicon on the website, which took about ten minutes but was worth as least an hour of feeling like I actually accomplished something).

I happen to really like JavaScript (which anyone who has visited my website, jessicawicksnin.com, can attest to) so I decided to give Google Apps Script a try.  You can now see the results at my github page (username jwicksnin)!

I want to point out the fatal flaw in my solution: the actual form is NOT embedded in the email.  I dare you to try to find a way to do this - if you do, please let me know.  However, this is the results I did come up with (as HTML in the body of the email):

Hello <client name>
<Address we have on file>
Please confirm <pre-filled URL> or change <same URL> so we can send you a gift.

Taking advantage of the pre-filled url idea, the client can see the address we're going to send to, and then go to a pre-populated form by following the link where they can easily change or simply confirm the address. Yay!