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Recently, a teacher who teaches at the next district over to where I live asked for a connection.

My response to him, was what is wrong with your district, I tried to arrange volunteers to come work in your district and they never responded.

His response: an attempt to sell me curriculum.  Oh, it is was something I'm already an expert in.

So when it isn't someone who is trying to hit on me, it's someone who is trying to sell me something.  I can't decide which is worse.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with Tile.

I used to products that always work.  I got addicted to Nokia's BlueTooth trackers, which yes, always worked.  The tile app/website seemed professional done and I got some good help at the beginning.

My latest problems is making me look for another solution.  Throughout my time using tiles, they have become lost before they expired — I assume they just stop working — and Tile has replaced them.

I was even running the Beta app for quite a while and troubleshooting it.

No longer.

I had a tile stop working, I put in a ticket, and after dealing with about 8 people in the support chain, and even one on chat.  The chat one was worse as he decided that I had the tile in hand and it wouldn't work, and I couldn't convince him I couldn't physically find it.

I was offered — get this — 20% off my next purchase on a Tile that had been activated in June.  

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.