Hello World. It's me, Ariel.

Client Side JS

with JQuery! This is the context in which I’m used to seeing JS, and it thankfully was indeed more concrete than the JS abstract, server side stuff we were writing before. Browser-based Tic Tac Toe and Towers of Hanoi (my old enemy, but perhaps this is the last time!?) were pretty straightforward. Snake was a little slower going because we had to write the game logic ourselves, but I think (hope) writing JS is becoming slightly clearer to me as time goes on. When I got home I also took the time to review the inital JS notes on closures, this/that, and ways to invoke a function, and that should help a lot. It was all pretty abstract to me the first time I read it, but now, many debugging sessions later..!

CSS, kinda sorta one of my favorite things

CSS day!!!! I <3 CSS! So it was a good day. It's just so satisfying laying out a site finally in class! It's like stretching out after being cooped up. Think my partner and I made good progress on our version of the "App Academy Friends" site; the only part of the project we didn't get to was Phase 12: Modal. (Apparently "modal" is the sign-in pop up you get on pages? Not sure. Up until this point I had associated it with a synthetic fabric.) Really got to make good use of some of the "new" (well, new to me anyway; I remember way back when opacity wasn't widely supported) CSS3 properties and functions, like border-radius and transform. Our site is child-safe! Everything is all rounded corners now! I will say that personally, my style would have differed from the instructions a wee bit--using fewer classes and more general selectors and ids (a "footer" class for "footer" tag seems a little redundant, doesn't it? And anyway, shouldn't it be a "footer" id? How many big footers do you plan on having on a page at once?), but all in all, was a fun exercise. Tomorrow we get to do jquery, which is more the js I'm used to seeing (event handlers and action events!), so hopefully it comes more naturally that js has so far!

So there’s a Q and a Stack…

Well that would explain a lot about Javascript, aha. Today was characterized by trying to debug the same issue for an hour or so, and then learning about this fundamental structure. “But wait, why doesn’t it ever stop for input?! Javascript sucks!” Ok, in this case, PEBCAK.

So I guess I better get used to deeply nested function calls in these server-side scripts where user input is involved. But looking at tomorrow’s reading materials, client-side stuff has handlers and more natural asynchronous treatment, so I am looking forward to that. Although not so sure I’ll be as big a fan of JS’s “prototype inheritance.”

Also spent some time this weekend developing DiscoverIt more. Got it up at http://1.discoverit.arielity.net. Slowly chugging along on that.