A Matching Tragedy

Assignment 11: about 1 hour. No major issues.

Assignment 12: about 1.5 hours. Included getting stuck on where to insert the HTML for the upload link.

Assignment 13: about 2 hours. Main issues were uncertainty where to install the edit points, but ultimately settled on index page, initial list page, and paged list page. Used edit point to update the index page’s content. All edit points linked from admin dashboard.

It took about 20 minutes for assignment 9. I’m also in process on beating to death Assignment 10 – I finally got the table to display properly, by judicious use of !important, given that some stuff that should not have been overriding was, and I was tired of trying to figure it out. Between today and in class last week, I’d say I’ve spent about four hours trying to get this to display properly.

And I forgot: one of the images for Assignment 8 is Spaceley’s Sprockets. That entertained me to no end at all.

I’ve just noticed that I’ve lost the alphabetising that I had previously on the list page. Add it to the list of things to look at in my general review this weekend.

EDIT: Finished assignment 10 in class, for a total of about six hours on that one. I’m trying to put down the utterly-OCD streak that really develops when I’m stressed – I think I surprised my robotics teacher by not really caring what the program DID so long as all the little boxes that made up the program lined up perfectly – so I shall leave the slight imperfections as they are … until this weekend, at which point they will be driving me crazy.

On to eleven!

I started to write a question about why I was seeing the entire name of the link in my nav list, as I added the list page to it, and fortunately, I pasted one of the links in. That was the only way that I saw it was a tilde separating name and clause; I thought it was a hyphen.

Other than that minor kerfluffle, the list/view pages are done. Total time spent, including rounding up and resizing images: actually, about 6 hours, since I had to go back in and re-resize them when I realised I’d done it all wrong.

Now to add the pager assignment to the list/view.

One thing I don’t understand: I haven’t seen guidelines for the final project, so I’m not sure how much of it focuses on technical knowledge and if any of it focuses on presentation. I realised that I have stuff still called “model/pageaddress” and that’s not so great. However, trying to just swap it doesn’t work, and I have other fish to fry at the moment, but this weekend I’m thinking I’ll get on moving everything out of models and into the root. And I’ll rename the links at that time, too.

I’ll probably add less default content at that point, too. I’ll try to, anyway. If there’s one thing I hate in life, it’s writing marketing/sell copy. I suck at it, and even though I had responsibility for WotC’s trade catalogue for a year’s worth of editions hasn’t really changed the fact that I’m completely pants at that kind of copy.

Don’t even ask me about book-jacket copy. Bane. Of. My. Life.

The next time a bunch of people say that my plans are crazy, I might listen to them. I’d thought I could do a full courseload and teach half time and finish this Internship That Will Not Die, and I figured wrong. Some of it’s that my brain has jumped the tracks from “student” to “teacher” and I’m left going “But I don’t want to write this paper!” because what I want to do is figure out how to present the next awesome subject to my students, or catch up on the infinite pile of grading.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks in terms of getting anything done. That seems to be changing – this weekend seems to be fairly efficient – and I’m going to try to get back into the rhythm of doing homework, but this is unlike anything I’ve done before. When I’ve worked and been a student before, it’s been a job, not a career. When I managed the bar in England, I wasn’t also inviting people home and serving them drinks at their convenience.

Gwen did suggest the idea of email office hours, though, and that’s helping too – I don’t have to respond right away when the email comes in, I can wait till the next day when “office hours” hits. Otherwise I’ll go nuts. But between that and the fact that the part of the quarter where half the class who have not been listening at all have just disappeared is where we’re at now, my inbox is actually quiet for once, which is nice.

Also, I’m no longer dealing with e-Socrates’ death throes; I set up http://www.onthefrequency.com for my CTN 160 course, which I’m going to at least offer to Al Boss when he returns to teaching next fall. God love Dreamhost’s plug-and-play approach; I told Carol that if she hosted one of these internship sites on Dreamhost I’d figure out how to make a registered-user side that has phpBB installed. And I figured out how to force Moodle’s cron to run appropriately. \o/

For the final project, I’m thinking of the straight PHP version of the site I did in Flash over the summer – my thought towards the end of the quarter there was to create a social networking site for urban decay enthusiasts, and combine my PHP and Flash final projects into one thing (and I got over halfway through the process before I realised: I was creating an application.) It failed miserably because I waited till too late to make that connection and because I didn’t really have good resources that I could find for figuring out how to hook PHP and Flash together (the one book I could find in-store specifically on the subject was for ActionScript 2 and Flash CS4 uses ActionScript 3, so.)

I think it’ll work, though, at least relatively well – for the list/view there’s images of Detroit, I can mock up a database of users in a simplified form (or I might go back and add in some of the other things I was thinking of for the Flash version). I changed the look and feel of the site in major ways, because I wasn’t specifically thinking of doing more with Detroit, but I think that’ll work all right in the end.

One cool thing, with the functional includes assignment – I used the dynamic navbar, which is AWESOME. I know it’s not really cognate, but jeez, everything I love about working with external style sheets is present in PHP, and that is so cool. The only thing I couldn’t do there that I wanted to was set up the title tag to give both the title from the meta_include file and the page name from the actual page, so that it would say City Of The Straits – Contact.php or whatever. Preferably, actually, Contact – City of The Straits. I’ll look into “this”, but I think that’s a JS function (in fact, I know it is) and I don’t remember if there’s a cognate function in PHP.

Checked the clocksite in IE8, and there are no changes necessary.

Very happy about that.

So. Having spent entirely too long designing a site for assignment 2 (I’m a designer, it’s what I do), I feel like I’m actually ready to start chopping it up into includes. I am not, quite frankly, sure at all why I spent, in the end, about 8 hours designing a template, but there it is, it’s done. And I managed to screw up the graphics. The outlines aren’t quite where I’d like them to be, frankly; if I decide to put this on my site (style is awfully bare) I will probably fix that.

That assumes, of course, that I get around to fixing the site itself.

On the plus side, thanks to CTN 161, I do know how to get pretty far with free images. On the plus-plus side, there were several of the same clock; the colours were wildly different, though, and since I’d settled on the blue and purple palette, I decided to black and white the smaller image. Some interesting effects came up with the whole thing; one of them was the crop on the header. Another was that I do not have the skillz to make a gradient go around a corner, though as I think of it, I suspect I know at least where to start. Like I say, I can probably get that to a more reasonable point pretty easily, but the assignment’s already a week late.

Obviously, I scrapped what I’d done before this – that’s factored into the 8 hours. I still have to verify this in IE, but I’ll do that tomorrow. I am hoping that it’s not too bad – IE 8 is surprisingly compliant, and I don’t think I’ve used anything that makes IE scream.

Then I just spent ten minutes changing the graphics again. At least I’m fairly happy with the outlines now.

Other than that, the troubleshooting assignment went fairly well. It took some getting into it – that totaled out at an hour and ten minutes – but I’ve seen a fair number of those errors before, over the summer. It’s actually a really nice error-reporting system, when it can report the error – certainly it’s at least as readable as the HTML validator, and it operates on the same logic. I get why there’s not a validator for PHP – too much that the user can do that’s not standardised – but I do wish it would return more errors. The ones where it hands you a line number to start looking on are super easy to fix.

I’m behind on the reading, but I’m hoping to get to that tomorrow after I do my brakes. I am a bit apprehensive about arrays – I understand them conceptually, and I like them, but having learned them in both Javascript and Visual Basic, I’m convinced that there’s going to be some subtle difference here. And yet, I covered those in the Headfirst book – I think it was around there, though, that I gave up on understanding PHP and just focused on doing it, which is terrible, but the book wasn’t teaching, and the problem with doing an independent study is that you may not have anyone mentoring you who knows anything about the subject you’re working on. Very frustrating.

So in a way I feel like I’m coming to arrays for the first time, at least in PHP.