Javascript

I have been plugging away at the portfolio site with the primary aim of getting a semi-functional prototype version to Dr. Theo Fotis on Monday 12th of December. There is a still a huge amount of stuff to do, fix-up and streamline I will add these tasks to my Trello board. This journal entry provides a rundown of the decisions that I have this week.

11 Dec, 2016

This week I completed some major fix-up on my grid. Remember when I thought that it was almost fixed? Well I was wrong. In fact I ended up recalculating the whole thing and basing it on a single column being 65px or 6.5% in width. Happily it is now working exactly as I need it to (Mozilla Developer Network saved the day againhttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layout/Grids#Creating_a_fluid_grid - I am going to up my donation this year).

8 Dec, 2016

After a lot of consideration, struggle and annoyance I finally gave in and decided to use a pre-existing tool for the timeline section of my front page. I looked a few different contenders in this final pass. Essentially, I came to the realisation that I would not be able to learn the requisite Javascript in order to build something sophisticated enough from scratch. I did a bit of trying out in this jsFiddle project, but kept running into deadends (this project is in a partially built state - so please do not judge me - the javascript is largely erased by this point): https://jsfiddle.net/43gg6x3v/7/ Initially I found only jQuery examples - but as I have previously stated, I really wanted to work with Vanilla Javascript, due to load times, future proofing the code content. I also feel that it will be more beneficial to my learning to stick to learning Vanilla Javascript (or rather Ecmascript 6) so that I truly get the language prior to becoming too invested in specific frameworks. Also having looked at these two resources: jQuery vs. Javascript gist and then the From jQuery to Javascript: A Reference - vanilla makes much more sense to me.

25 Nov, 2016

Over the past three weeks since the start of the module, I have been working away on the development of my portfolio site concept and gaining domain knowledge to support the development process. I have found myself in a situation where I have been torn between completing the UX procedures and design artefacts that I learned about and implemented during previous modules and starting to code. It is like standing at the edge of an exciting, and slightly daunting, precipice wondering whether to make the leap. The good news is, I am close. I must also at this point, state that I aim to make a real and useful website. It will be short and sweet but it will, hypothetically at least, fulfill a real-world purpose. I also hope that it will be possible to use the site to support future research work that I plan to undertake.

23 Oct, 2016

This journal entry continues on from the section, “First thoughts related to this journal site” in my first post. In that section I outlined plans to test a number of WordPress themes that had been tagged with accessibility. This led me down a fascinating path of learning with one wrong turn along the way.

13 Oct, 2016