Category: Blog

Here’s another Udacity link:

I like their latest pricing, as you pay as you go.

You get a mentor — someone like me — that will guide you through the course, and help you meet your deadlines.

Come join us!

I have been working with Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for over 4 years now, and have loved it.  I really like working with those students.  The only drawback is that I am limited to 27 hours a week and I'm limited by enrollment.  This is a slow time of year and I'm doing about 10 hours a week.

Recently I was approached by Udacity to be an independent contractor.  I have been working with them since March and I really enjoy it.  

In May, Udacity changed their business model –> now you can sign up and get started as soon as you want.  Before they worked in cohorts, and you might have to wait a month to get started.  They've also changed the mentorship model.  They assign students to mentors, which I am one.  You get one 1:1 session a week, can you can ask be questions through there student hub.  I login a few days each day to check in on my students.

If you are interested, and use this link, we both get $50 off a course, and I have a few I want to try.

GoDaddy has an interesting policy.

The website I am speaking of, belongs to a non-profit website.  GoDaddy hosted it for a period of time for $49 a year, and when they stopped, I found someone who would host it for a mention on the main page.

I set everything up over a month ago and changed the DNS entries.  Working fine until this morning.

GoDaddy put a "parking" entry in our DNS.  NOT COOL.  A hosting service should NEVER change the DNS without permission.  

It was an easy fix but not my favorite way to start the day.

The MWS program was interesting and probably typical of what we would be asked to do in a job — take a very mobile unfriendly website and make it mobile / offline first.

I'm going to build a "new" website, using the techniques we learned.  It won't be completely new as I will be using old data.

They didn't mention optimizing websites and using tools like babble, to make them more mobile friendly.  Webpack is the latest tool to accomplish that, and I'm going to start with web pack first.

The resources I've been looking at include:

The official Docs

Step by Step instructions for newbie - this is what I am using below.

Not really about Webpack but good stuff for later.

I've created a Github repository at https://github.com/kathweaver/AmBRN-Mobile. Feel free to join the fun.

The first thing to do is set up .gitgnore file so it will ignore node, Mac stuff, and Visual Studio stuff.  That's in my master branch 

Now I am switching to a branch called setup-webpack 

The next thing is to initialize npm, which adds a package.json file

Then we install Webpack and the Webpack cli.  Note that you need to add –save-dev so that the dependency will be added to the package.json file.

Next I configured Webpack.  Added a script in package.json and a configuration file.

Finally I'm going to add some HTML from my old site and put it in the src directory.  Since I don't have any javascript code yet, I created an empty main.js. 

The build worked.  In theory now, anyone can download my repo and it will build in Webpack.  I'm committing this branch and working on the next part later.

The Udacity course had us take a regular web site and turn it into a mobile web site.  Those are also called progressive web apps.

The point is that the web site is available both on and off line, that it works on any device from old cell phones and computers to the latest and greatest in smart phones, tablets, and computers.

The philosophy is mobile first, as if it will work on an old phone with a small screen and memory it will work anywhere.  The site is cached to make it run faster, and the data is stored on the device as much as possible.

It's already making me a better web design teacher, and I think it will help with the non-profit and not for profits I work with.

I personally believe in designing for mobile, and that mobile web apps are more flexible than apps written for the phone.  In fact, my Window phone would still work on a mobile web app.

Yesterday, I needed to move money from the joint account to the personal account. I also needed lunch.

I was able to get my morning coffee/chocolate drink, then go to Chase ATM and then the Wells Fargo ATM, then the gym and finally lunch using apps and taps with my phone.

The technology is getting there but I still have a wallet pasted to my cell phone case.

Sent from my iPhone

I'm working on the Nano Degree from Udacity for Mobile Web Specialist.  I know exactly what needs to be done.

I need to display whether or not a restaurant is a favorite.  After two days of struggling I get it to work.  Seriously, all I need to do is retrieve a restaurant by id and display a value based on true or false.  It shouldn't take two days to figure out the code for that.

It shouldn't take me forever to figure out how to do a POST to the web site to change the value.

Saw something neat on facebook today and it was the path that someone took to be a success from KFC to RN.

Well, I didn't save my name tags, but:

first job was candy stripping

Krystal's

McDonald's

— got smart and found out I'd make double at a grocery store and not come home greasy – Jitney Jungle

Air Force ROTC & Kelly Girl & Tutor (to pay for college)

Mississippi Chemical

Texas Instruments

Dallas ISD

Johns Hopkins University

Personally I think it been pretty cool.

I have GOT to start blogging regularly again.  Especially since I have some fun things going on.

In the technology world, my teaching schedule has been the best ever.  I almost always do more than 10 hours a week, and hit 20 hours a lot.  Most of the students are fun to teach, but every once in a while I get one that wants to manipulate the system.

My favorites are the ones who want a one-on-one session and then expect me to their assignment.

I'm taking a Udacity course.  It was a scholarship.  Back in January, I filled out a form (I love filling out forms), and got a chance to compete for the scholarship which I won.  I'm still not sure how, because part of it was communicating with the group and I stop when a male student shot me down.  I'm getting better at dealing with that.

The course is on mobile web development which was a great choice.  We are writing a restaurant review site.  I've been consisting finishing projects a month in advance and I'm a student leader.  This afternoon we're having a study jam and I'm going to be online for two hours helping my fellow students.

I'm on the last part, and just about got it working the way the second part did.  Each part, they change the way the server behaves and we had to change the program to match.  This time we get the data differently than we did Part 2.  I've always started out by getting the web site to function again first.  Later on today, I'm going to focus on getting the first new feature to work.

I've got some ideas for mobile web sites and will soon start trying to implement them.  I'm also trying to figure out how to use this one.

One of the things that has been giving the MWS track fits is creating responsive images.  

The course suggests setting up an automated build process using with ImageMagick or ImageOptim.  I'm running a Mac, and I chose ImageMagick.

First you have to install Node.js.  Directions are at https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/installing-node.  There are very good directions on this site for installing Node.js .  I used the MacOS installer and updated everything.

I then installed ImageMagick using http://imagemagick.org/script/index.php . They had suggested another link but it indicated that it didn't work with the current Mac operating system.  I am not sure how I originally installed it, but I ended up copying the latest version and putting it in the place the other one was.

ImageMagick automates a lot of the work that GIMP and Photoshop does — resize images, make animated gifs, crop and other fun stuff.

For a mobile web app, we want to compress the images and make about three different versions, a small, medium and large version basically for phone, tablet or large desktop screens.

The next thing we need is Grunt.  Grunt is a task runner — if we set up Grunt correctly, then we can take any group of images and make them responsive.  We're also going to use it later to set up our Mobile Web environment. 

I followed this document: https://gruntjs.com/getting-started  to get started.

There is lots of documentation on using Grunt/Imagick/Responsive Images.   The reading that was provided in the course was: https://addyosmani.com/blog/generate-multi-resolution-images-for-srcset-with-grunt/

Here's the files I used for the project:  https://github.com/kathweaver/images