Decisions Decisions

Just spent the last 7 hours (around 10:30pm-5:30am) working on setting up the blog for my site, and already have run into a couple problems.

1. The code they use for the blog info (Example here) as you can see, is just a mess. There is some order in it which I can decipher but only to the extent as "Ok, this piece prints it out as an H1 tag". I'm able to move things around and whatnot but it just makes me want to pull my hair out.


2. My site uses PHP for part of the layout, and Blogger does not like PHP. Their pages run on XML, which won't allow PHP coding on the page. :(


3. Although painful, moving the style over is doable, though since it's being external, comments would be lost. When defaulted back to blogger, the comments still showed up, but on the external, all comments went away.

All together, I think I can just have a link to the blog on my main website, linking to the blog and opening it in a new window. That way, people don't have to leave my main site, to view the blog and try to find it again. It just seems so much easier to have it hosted on blogger.com than external at the moment.



I think I should probably get some sleep now, seeing as it's close to 6am, by the time of this post. Good night, and hopefully you're not hoping to move your blog also ;)

Overview of Spring 2010

It has been a great trip in the CIT198B class. At the beginning I had a feeling I knew a lot of what was going to be taught. Some I did know, like facebook (even if it is general information, and nothing in depth like making apps for it). Others, I didn't quite know a lot that I thought I did. I had a feeling the Google Docs was just going to be like Microsoft Word / Excel / Powerpoint, but with the multiple contributors aspect. I actually learned quite a lot about those applications and how they can be useful in the real world when it comes to group thinking at work or organizations.

Now that the class is over, I thought I might stop posting, but then I thought, "Hey, I might be able to use some past assignments as part of a portfolio". So, I came up with the idea to move this blog from being hosted on Blogger, to being hosted on my own website. It would have the same style / look as the rest of the site, and would make it simpler to add posts now that I am in the feeling of posting more. This class was a great stepping stone to occasionally posting a blog post here and there, instead of a post once every few months or even years.

We'll see how easy it can be done. Making it redirect to my site was easy enough, but now the joyful task of reading the blogger css code and styling it to match my site, and not a default template.

Google Docs

Microsoft Excel worksheets brought to the collaborative groups to share ideas and content. My worksheet is based of of what type of coding someone has had experience with. Please indicate which type of programming you have done by changing the value in the cell on the table.

Link to spreadsheet

PHP

The following screencast is a little intro to what PHP is. It will discuss some of the common things that PHP can do for web designers and explain a little about how it works when interacting with databases. This will just be a short intro, as PHP can do a lot more when it comes to more advanced features, but these will be slightly more common examples that you are using even while reading this blog post.

Screencast Link