it's all good on zephir

except reCaptcha, but that's no problem
Spent a cople hours sat. morning with the new theme and making links for the stempel project that make sense and get to all the right assignment pages.

I can't wait to put this together again for another project.
Need to put this up on his host.
Theme looks like crap in IE8 - need to do something about that.
Don't fully understand permissons and file secrity
Should do .htaccess assignment looks like best way to lock down files.
Seems like we sped through SQL - or maybe it's really that simple - four commands

Trying to use classes better. Current design has many divs with IDs.

seperating demo from real

Just figuring out how very similar many of the demo pages are tot the final. Many exercises in adding code to existing pages to increase functionality.
Now I have a bunch of files I don't need but don't want to throw out.

3 hours before class Tuesday
2 hours with Matt Wednesday.
4 hours Thursday

Documnetation

Worked with Matt from class on one of our assignments. We installed the documenter which was a good exercise, because I've always been pretty bad about documentation of anything. I like the idea of keeping notes as comments right with my work. Now for recording hours - still a week spot. Working with computers reminds me of working in the darkroom. Every task by itself is very small, in the darkroom I was constantly timing things and somehow lost track of hours. Here I check and recheck things I do and the time slips away.

I'm imagining my experience here as being given a tool box and being shown how to use the tools. Pretty cool.

working

everything is making more sense. Definitely spending a lot of time. 5 hours already today.
got the documenter installed.
Can't find where THEME_PATH is defined - I'd like to use that and don't know how to
I like the objects we have such as copyright and sidebars - I want to learn how to make those to create a little nicer copyright notice
put in another 6 hours or so
got stempels list/view page to work, this will be great - need to work on theme and design still, but it works...

having trouble getting documenter to work, but then I don't know what it's supposed to do.

moving on

get a new theme up and running yesterday - about 5 hours
got mysql_demo page repurposed to use test_cars data and shows in new theme
several hours there

making tables

Got my project on wenick-photo host and zephir, made a couple tables for fun and used one of cars on the project page.

I have about four hours into it today. phpMinAdmin seems easier to use than PHPMyAdmin

command line

Finally got into zephir by using the command line. tried out the commands listed in our Lessons Page. Fun. Made new table on zepher and new page on final project site to show data printed to page from db

Created a new db on wenick-photo too using phpMyAdmin - very graphical, probably need more of a lesson with this than with command line

MAMP

installed MAMP - Mac/Apache/MySql/PHP on my laptop - trying to get it configured - graphical interface is very different than the command line we used in class. Definitely want to learn the command line interface. It will be nice having this n local machine.
Had trouble logging in to zephir - will find out more in class tonight.

reCAPTCHA

Spent about 5 and a half hours working on the contact form to get it to work. Some problem with zephir not finding a socket. Documentation on google showed to go get a new recaptchalib.php file that had an updated function to send the contact page name as text rather than by ip address. Also had some updated URLs since google bought recaptcha. That didn't work. Went through contact file again, uploaded again, respelled zephir on filezilla. None of it worked. Put it on wenick-photo, got a key and it worked.

Maybe will do multiple form - did it took about an hour.

still having probs with zephir - works on wenick-photo

reCAPTCHA is a very cool thing/service, never realized it before. Also relevant to photography.

php is hard

got very confused after monday's class.
The idea that there are pre-made functions in php that are out of sight and do things based on short commands like foreach($blah as $whatever) is just sinking in.
not even sure I got that function right.

IT WORKS!!!!

just finished assignment 3 - where we use error reporting tools to fix problems with a web app. I spent 4 hours at it this morning and really didn't think I was going to get it. I went way down the wrong path at first - it really pays to save work and create a new file at different points so you can go back. I completely mangled one version and was able to go back. The Adder WORKS!!!!

http://edison.seattlecentral.edu/~dwenic01/itc280/assignments/a3-1-4.php

I used Zephir to do the assignment but had problems linking to it there. final version hosted on edison.

like magic

This php stuff is really hard to understand. It's working and all but I don't understand why - especially why I see all the code when I view source on my web page. I thought I was just supposed to see the php from the index page, but I seem to be getting it all, maybe the browser puts together all the pages and shows me everything at once? Spent about half an hour finding a template to use and about an hour doing the assignment 2.

splitting up pages

watched the elluminate of Wednesday's class - I got the concept of cutting up the files and the nuts and bolts of saving files and includes, but I'm not clear on how to make the decision of where to cut... the idea of chopping off '< /div>'s did not make sense. I'll play with it over the weekend.

ITC 280 assignment 1

Just completed homework assignment one. It took about two hours to set everything up. Its all visible here.

Tuesday

Today, really yesterday, I spent about a minute and a half thinking about my ITC 280 class. It happened in the middle of Javascript class when I put a $ in front of a variable and had to figure out why nothing happened. Apart from that nothing happened today.

Hello World

This is my first blog post. I set this up to track my progress in my web design/development classes at Seattle Central Community College.