Coding!

While in Code Academy, we were really encouraged to blog at least once weekly about what we were learning. It was a nice marketing tool for them but it also served as a great way to track my progress and improve my understanding of general concepts. It was a worthwhile exercise and something I intend to try to keep up with now that I'm working on this stuff full time, improving my skill set and expanding my toolbox. The first 6 weeks have been awesome; I'm learning a lot.

Javascript - Though we use Ruby on Rails as our framework, the mapping feature is largely built in Javascript. Besides a few jQuery effects I managed to get working during Code Academy, I didn't have much experience with Javascript and even trying to read through our .js files was difficult at first. But over the last two weeks, I really feel like I've been starting to pick it up.

I'm updating our map using the Google Maps API which I've found to be a great way to start to learn. They have a ton of examples on how to build your requests and handle the responses, and if you can start to follow those, you're half way there. It's been fun figuring this out - I'm looking forward to using CoffeeScript next.

Chargify - It wasn't planned but I've ended up getting a lot of experience with different payment processors. I've used PayPal, Stripe, and now Chargify. We use Chargify to handle our subscription service to the Picket Report widget, and I found the API pretty easy to handle. It took me a while to handle the errors that Chargify sends back (turns out to just be an Active Record resource if you're working with the Chargify gem...you can use the .errors method and print them easily). Stripe is still the easiest and most elegant solution I've found, but it's nice to get some experience with a number of them. My main takeaway - avoid PayPal.

CSS - I spent the first month developing the front end of our site. I've picked up a lot of awesome tricks on styling and can handle the jQuery effects pretty easily at this point. It's this CSS/front end area that I think I've improved upon the most and feel pretty comfortable now saying that I can do just about anything I'd like to do in terms of making something look a certain way. This is a pretty sweet improvement over the Rails scaffolding CSS!

Code Academy: Week 7

A couple of weeks ago I came across a site out of Detroit that allowed anyone to enter in an idea for the redevelopment of Michigan Central Station. I liked the idea and decided it'd be a good exercise to try to build a similar site as practice for what I've been learning in class. Detroit Pays Off was born (more on the idea at some other point).

The actual rails coding was really easy. There isn't much to the site, just a model for the posts that includes the idea, the posted on date, and the number of votes, but because I wanted to share the site here, I spent a lot of time last week taking my first stab at the frontend coding of a site - mainly CSS and a few cool effects written with javascript/jquery.

I basically just stole Tumblr's colors and layout as a model for the CSS coding and messed around with different divs and options until I managed to get things where I wanted them. Much easier said than done but it was a worthwhile endeavor. I have a much greater grasp of what CSS is and how to hack something together that looks somewhat presentable. As for the javascript/jquery, I spent just about all weekend working on getting three very small effects working. You'll notice the first one when you click on "Submit Your Idea". Oh yeah! You saw that animation slide? Took me all day Sunday to figure that out. The other two were somewhat less difficult, you can click on the hand and it counts a vote without refreshing the page, and when you enter in a new idea it fades in as the newest idea submitted. You'll have to submit an idea to see that last one so don't be shy...submit!

I'm pretty critical of how things have turned out and what still needs to be done on the site (for starters, I hate how the submitted ideas section is laid out in a table, and I'd like to add comments and the ability to sign in with Facebook), but being able to do this on my own has been awesome. Just a few weeks ago I would have seen the Talk to The Station site and been frustrated that I couldn't build a similar site without resorting to a pre-built WordPress theme. Now when I come across any site or idea, I can just create it myself.

Have any ideas for a website/web app? Send 'em over...I'll build it.