Finals Week

Finished my final project, and integrated a file upload with the RTE, so it's time to sign off and figure out where to move and how to extend my website as we finish up the year and welcome in a new year currently full of promise.

It was hard working while going to school, but worth it now that we're at the end of the session, and I can up my hours so I can get some money to pay for the extra expenses of the holiday season.

Happy first night of Hanukkah to everyone who celebrates. Tonight is the first candle, remembering the miracle - and hoping that we'll be able to recognize the miracles we experience in this life.

RTE

Not sure I like the look and feel of the RTE, but at least it's integrated into my index page so I can easily change the text as we wind up class and I move out into the world of looking for a "real" job.

Spent about an hour working on the download/config/integration into my site, but will need to spend a bit more time getting it to be a little nicer. Seems pretty clunky right now.

Fixed Alignment!!

Making the thumbnail images align to the LEFT instead of the middle fixed the problem with the text wrapping around the image, so all is well!!

Yippee!!

Thumbnails

Doh! Of course, I just had to upload my pictures again,and the thumbnails were created.

The one problem I'm having, though, is that the title of the item isn't wrapping correctly on the right side of the image. It doesn't look good, so I'm going to have to see if I can use a "float" or something to make the words flow together on the right of the picture. Back into my HTML book...

Yippee!!

columns and image upload

Well, the image upload is working, but the thumbnails aren't on my list page. I will have to work on that tomorrow. I need to understand how the code gets executed to create the thumbnail image.

Spent about 2 hours uploading and editing the files required for the columns and upload functionality. Didn't bother with different category types right now, as I'm not sure that I want to even do that.

Admin Pages

Since my husband is Santa at Nordstrom's and at a photo studio, I took care of his family during the Thanksgiving week. That put me so far behind that I was a bit stressed out, but my admin pages are up and running.

Left the sample developer and his password, so access should be obvious from the admin.php form.

Spent a couple of hours listening to the classes I missed and getting the files up and running from my website, changing the format for the admin link so that it fit in better with my site. All-in-all about 3 hours to get this assignment done. Now I'm on to the next one up there. Boy, missing out so many classes is taking its toll on my nervous system, and work is necessary, but putting a crimp in my getting things done.

Off I go to the next assignment!!

Paging complete

Used the cooler arrows, so I had to make more space under my list items, but I finally have a look I like.

It only took about 2 hours to code and debug the garage sale so that 4 items show at a time. I like the larger arrows and being able to bounce to the first and last page. Now I want to add more items!! :)

Back to the book to debug my contact form.

Bad news on the job front -- I didn't get the job for which I interviewed. Oh, well...

home/classes/home

This makes no sense. I've been trying to get my website to get an email out to me at my home email address. I tried:


\<\?php echo INCLUDE_PATH\; ?\>/mafMail.html

and got a 404 Error saying that the system couldn't find:

/home/classes/home/classes/mdavis31/inc_codestress/mafMail.html

so, I took out the include_path and put the literal path in as is set in my config include file, and I got the same 404 error.

Next attempt will be to use the virtual path (since that worked for my logo image) and see if that works...

Son of a gun. It did work. So, I just have to move my mail pages into my regular include directory, and they work.

Off to work, and then to paging homework...

Interview for a real job

Well, I was hoping to be off the hook until the new year, but it looks like I was tagged by a friend for a job on the eastside. I will probably mess up the interview because I stink at interviews, but I have to give it a try.

Hopefully, I won't miss too much in class this week, but I am entering "interview mode" and won't be able to get to class.

Now the hard part is remembering what I used to do (i.e. Java/XML/C#) instead of PHP (which I now LOVE).

Sick as a dog - and no pictures.

Well, I finally fixed my headers, and got pictures (that I stole from Amazon for this assignment) to display for each item. You'll never guess how I managed to drive myself crazy with pictures existing but not displaying...

I set the permissions on the upload file to 0700 instead of 0755. Doh! So my website wouldn't show the pictures from that directory on the website!!

Hard to say how much time I spent on this today, since I've been running to/from the bathroom all day. I'm heading to bed for good and all right now, and will look at the assignment tomorrow to see if there's anything else I need to clean up.

Nighty-night!

Oh, just do things in order

So, I took the list/view assignment doc, borrowing the printer at the office (since I currently don't have a working printer at home) and thought I understood how to just invent something for myself so that I'd have an inventory to use for my assignment. I can't use the database for my friend's site because it's way too big and not on a system I'm comfortable configuring, so I'm just going to make something up.

I figure I'll do a virtual garage sale, since my husband and I are marginally employed, and I'd love to get rid of some things, but my condo association doesn't allow garage sales. I suppose that's why we have Craig's List...

Anyway, I spent too much time trying to understand photoshop, and not enough on the meat of my assignment, so now it's late and I'm tired so I'm just going to run the muffin demo and see what happens. One good thing did come out of the waste of effort with photoshop, and that is that I figured out how I can generate the space I need for the lovely logo a friend made for me ONLY on the first page, and then leave the rest of the pages with the same CSS file, but without the image or the forced spaces. It'll be cleaner, and the images I'll need for the books and whatever will stand out more on the pages.

So, about 3 hours wasted with photoshop, and 1 hour creating the demo for muffins. I need to get the muffin images uploaded (well, downloaded and then uploaded) to see the full meal deal. I can take pictures myself for the garage sale (another benefit of choosing that for my list/view assignment) but I'll use the same naming conventions we're using in the demo. I like the idea - it's clean and simple.

Off to watch monk and get some herbal tea. Enough for today.

It worked!

The good news is that I was able to create an if statement that selected the style for the first page and subsequent pages. The bad news is that I am terrible at photoshop, and I am going to have to mess with the alternate image I have to make it worth using.

Spent about 3 hours tonight messing with files, but left the new image out so the second page (the one for First Data) looks naked right now. I'll work on PS over the weekend and see if I can make something worth using.

Virtual Path

Okay. Finally found the problem with the virtual path. The file name didn't match - it had nothing to do with the path! Oy!

Still having trouble getting rid of the spaces and image on pages other than the home page. Part of that has to do with the forced spaces that I have in my header (which used to be in the index.php file) that give the space required for the extra-large picture. Now that the extra spaces are on every single page, I have to think about what to do with all that space. For now, I'm leaving the title and image on every page, but that won't do for the long term.

I tried modifying conn_inc.php to check to see if THIS PAGE started with 'index', in which case, I'd use the standard header_inc.php. Otherwise, I created a file header2_inc.php, but it didn't ever find a match, so I NEVER got the image. That won't do. Just got a hint as to why that is, so I'm going to see if I can get the different header version to work.

I also tried to set a variable $cssClassName and do a switch statement at the start of the header to determine whether THIS PAGE is 'index.php'. If it is, then the class name gets set to maffy, otherwise, it gets set to otherpages. That really blew things up.

Well, off to home to work on the various header choices.

Weird, but sort of done

I can't get the VIRTUAL_PATH variable to pick up my style sheet, so I used my old link to CSS in the index.php file for now. It's very confusing having the include directory outside of the web application folder, but it works for now.

I have to figure out what's supposed to be in the link for the the assignment, though. I didn't do anything with the MySQL part of the assignment (other than changing my credentials in the appropriate file.

More later. Time for class.

Spent about 2 hrs on getting everything merged and working.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

I went back and forth on question number 7, and finally decided on "database user" instead of web user, but I didn't look at my notes when I took the test. I just got too cocky, and zipped through the questions too fast. The ones I got wrong - I know the right answer, but I blew it.

Kicking myself today. Moving on tomorrow.

The new test

Spent some time today looking over the test questions on the test I need to submit by Sunday night. There's one (number 7) that gives two possible answers (IMNSHO). The question involves giving a user select permission on a database - select only - and is either a "typical" web user or a "read-only" db user.

If all the user can do is select, then the permission set is read-only by definition...I'll have to see if the grant of permissions requires a login, which shouldn't be required for typical web users. Anonymous searching is more typical on websites (I think). Of course, if you want to DO anything with the data, registration is often required. I'll have to read that question again - even though I do think I should go with my instincts and not over-think the question.

I'm glad the test is this weekend. Although I'll be spending the lion's share of my time creating a "haunted hallway" leading to our front door (which will be replaced by a large black lacquer coffin) for Halloween, and setting up tombstones and scattering skeleton bones, it won't be as busy as the actual day, when I also have to think about cooking for guests and getting the house ready. Luckily, my husband is the host of a large haunted house in Kirkland tomorrow night, so I'll have time to work on PHP/MySQL and get some reading and experimenting done. Maybe I'll even start moving things around on the website (putting the header/footer/navbar in the /include/ folder, etc.) like I've been wanting to do.

Troubleshooting

Finally connected my blackAdder.php to my template.php page. I should probably rename the template back to const.php or something, but I already see that the php admin program will need to be linked to the page, so there'll be more time to reorganize later. When I add the link to that program, maybe I can move my include files into the include folder and clean up the home directory.

I want to take a look at the Google app engine this afternoon because I'm heading out to a seminar at Google in Fremont this evening to hear the scoop from one of their designers and I want to be able to ask good questions.

About 1.5 hrs on the test - testing out the snippets just to be thorough
and about the same amount troubleshooting the addition function.

I need to do more reading, but we're getting to the scary part now - connecting to the db. Always seems that I have trouble with authentication and databases. Maybe having the opportunity to set the password myself it won't be too much of a pain.

Moved the nav bar

Since we only had to move the header and footer, I put off adding the complexity of moving the nav bar until today. Having done the header and footer, the nav bar turned out to be pretty easy. I worked in the /dev folder and moved everything up to the main directory when I was sure it worked.

One problem I seem to have is making Google docs understand that my docs are PUBLIC. I am working in the lab now, so the machine doesn't know me, and I ended up with a google login screen when I used the link from my template.php. What a drag! How explicit do I have to be? I ended up sending BN an invite, but there's got to be a better way.

Spent about 40 minutes removing the nav bar from myHeader.php and moving the files around. Also changed my profile so that template.php is my site instead of const.php. Not sure if I was supposed to do that or not, but it seems to make sense going forward.

include files

Spent 5 hours working on making it look "simple" to include header and footer files into a template.php file on Zephir.

I find it very strange that I can have a header file that starts a tag like <body> and even <table> and then leaves it hanging, and then a footer that closes off all these open tags. Strange. But, evidently, it works, so who am I to complain???

time: 5 hrs
files: template.php, myFooter.php, myHeader.php, template.html

files updated using the links in what used to be const.php (now called template.php).
added the footer, header and templates into the file list. Didn't change the project plan because I still have no idea what the plan is going to be...

Zephir

Put my old php files for Codestress on Zephir. Still have to make the directories match the suggested format, but am feeling better today.

I have some include file work to do because my first PHP teacher said that PHP will fail if include files create an infinite loop such that:

A includes B
B includes C
C includes A

Luckily, includes are in Chapter 4, which is next up for me.

Time spent will be reported when I finish doing the exercises.

Spent 2 hours with Chapter 4, and found out some interesting things.
I didn't know about include_once() - and that might have fixed the problem in the code for my last class. Also, the conditional css changes. I have to experiment more, but I need to get to bed to get to work and school tomorrow.

Okay. This is starting to be fun. :)

Already scrambling

Working late, missing class - not the greatest start to the quarter.
Heading to the website now to check homework assignments, and check on the lecture uploads.
Assuming today's isn't there, yet, but I might as well check and see what the second lecture in summer quarter had to say...

More later.

First Post for ITC 280

For some reason I am terrified this quarter. I don't seem to be able to get anything done. I've spent hours - at least 3 - reading and re-reading the lessons, but nothing is sticking. I have to start coding, but I feel frozen.

One step at a time. Off to see if I can get my google docs and make them public. I know I can invite people, but I don't see an option to share openly. Not that my project plan has much in it, yet.

Step one, done.