Prior to this lab, I had no experience using html or css. Last semester, I did a very basic website using html which had some text and
then opened up another page. I also worked on the codeacademy link that was provided as practice earlier on the semester. I think doing the
codeacademy practice was really helpful because I had written some code using some of the tags.
CSS Techniques Used For The Assignment
All links in navigation bar were styled. All headers were styled to be a certain font.
The footer size was also adjusted. Other CSS styles used are the following:
All images used were minimized/maximized and had the margins and padding adjusted.
The margin and padding was set to 0px unless otherwise needed.
Selectors with shared rules were grouped together to simplify the CSS file.
'My Childhood' and 'Now' in the about page are floating and have borders.
All headings were styled in atleast one of the following ways: font size, color, and font family.
The links were styled to be different colors depending on whether you click it, hover over it, or haven't touched it.
Likes/Dislikes
I liked doing the html part of the website, in terms of adding text and pictures stuff of that sort. The CSS part was kind of annoying to do.
My CSS rules for the id and class selectiors wouldn't apply to my page. Some of the rules applied but others did not. It was fustrating trying
to figure it out and that is where most of my time went. In general, messing around with the padding, margins, and other css page layout rules
was tedious.
LAB 2
Techniques Learned
Created a form and using all the controls that come with it
Implementing responsive web design techniques to scale everything down,
while still following my vision.
Likes/Dislikes
I liked having the freedom to based the lab on whatever topic I chose.
Having the option to choose made me actually want to code the website,
implement the techniques, and make it look presentable. Like lab one, it
was tedious trying to get everything to look the way I wanted it to.
It took me a while to try and figure out why my media queries weren't working.
I understood the concept but trying to understand and solve the error was tedious.
Using for-loops to iterate through the array and displayign neccessary information.
Dynamically creating images using DOM.
Creating nodes to add elements into the HTML page.
Likes / Dislikes
I liked working the DOM and seeing elements & text appear as the user clicks certain things.
I also liked to use coding techniques that we used in previous coding classes, such as loops, comparisons,
and methods.We used eventhandlers in C# and it was nice reusing those concepts. The most difficult
part of the assignment was getting the images to appear on the page. I tried to manipulate one of the
methods in the class demos but it still took a bit of messing around to get the image to appear.
How to use JQuery to perform Javascript functions with less code.
Using JSON to manipulate an object and converted it to a string.
Working with localStorage to save and retrieve different houses.
Likes / Dislikes
I liked doing the validation for the inputs and actually creating the house objects and storing
everything in local storage. I didn't like working with the House class because the setters/getters kept giving
errors so I had to create a regular constructor. The search page was a little bit tricky but I got it to work
just through the validation I had. I liked how I could reuse a good chunk of my code throughout the pages.
Learning how to use Web API's and AJAX to work with a DB
How you can do the same thing as lab 4 but with a different language and technique
Likes/Dislikes
Learning how to work with PostMan was a bit fustrating at first because I kept getting erros. Eventually I learned
that I was using the tool incorrectly. I liked being able to put everything together and when my GET methods finally
worked through Visual Studio - it was very satisfying. I also liked how lab 4 was essentially the same thing minus
AJAX and Web APIs so I could reuse a bunch of my code. That also saved a lot of my time. The most annoying part was how
my web api methods worked through postman and visual studio, both before and after publishing it, but when I tested my application
nothing worked.
Combining everything we learned so far with this new framework
Working with command line to get our sample tests to work
Ability to convert Excel files to html pages
Using different Node modules in one project & how theres multiple ways to do one thing with just this framework
Likes/Dislikes
I liked using Node to work with files. I also liked how we used routing for rendering the webpages. It was very similar to lab5.
Orignally we were going to use a database to hold the records for our project
but we couldn't find enough information for the module that would be required to do so. Thus, we opted for an excel sheet.
I also thought it was pretty cool how we could've done the demo in a variety of ways just based on how we decided to store our
records. The part I didn't like though was due to how many modules Node has, picking the right ones for us and in general
just picking a starting point for the project. It was extremely overwhelming because Node has hundreds of modules. By the end
of the project, I hadn't even gone through half of the avaiable modules. I also enjoyed creating the tutorial page because
it refreshed my mind of everything we used. It was also directly related to some things I tried as a way to do the project.