Presentation

My presentation is about Walt Disney and how he grew up, as well as how he eventually founded Disney Brothers’ Studios and created iconic films relevant even today. My presentation is broken up into Walt Disney’s early childhood biography, early cartoons, commercial success, and legacy. I have a tentative repository. Furthermore, a loose script of the audio can be found here.

Project

My project can be found here.

Description

I used standard shell scripting to automate adding csv entries to a table in a database. I broke this assignment down into two scripts.

survey.sh

My survey script interacts with the user to ask five general survey questions. It then takes the user’s input and saves those as variables. Taking into account the date and time of the interaction, the script outputs the variables and the timestamp, along with a random number to give the entry a unique identification number, and then converts the data into a temporary csv file. This script then calls for the database script to run, and once that is finished, the temporary file is removed.

database.sh

After the survey script links to this database script, this script copies the temporary csv file into the secure directory that MYSQL requires the data to be in. This allows for the creation of a database and table for the entry to be put into. This script also checks for existing databases and tables to prevent creating duplicates. While doing so, it updates the user on what is occuring in the programming. Once the necessary databases and tables are created, the entry is added to the table such that the data within the entry match up with the table variables. The current version of the database is then dumped into an export file. Consecutively, the temporary csv file in the secure directory is removed, and the script prints out a confirmation message notifying the user that the entry was added to the database.

Description

My code converts any (markdown) file to html, docx, odt, pdf, and rtf files. It takes the input file name and removes anything past the “.” and renames the file using the new format of text.

Methods

I haven’t had any prior experience with Pandoc or scripting in general before this class, so most of my code is based on outside resources.

Converting a file to the different file types was pretty straight-forward since I used information from here and here.

Creating variables was more difficult. We went over how to create new variables in class, but I had multiple issues renaming my files. For instance, my file name was “dickinson.md,” but the only way I could figure out how to rename my file resulted in “dickinson.md.’new file format’” so I had to browse Google to learn how to only use characters before the ‘.’ symbol. I ended up using this link, but had confusion over how to refer to my original variable. I don’t quite understand why I refer to my variable without the ‘$’ symbol, but I’m just glad that my code works – at least I think it does.

Product

• Repository
• Script
  • I left some questions commented in my code
• Source File
  • html
  • docx
  • odt
  • pdf
  • rtf – the instructions said to have 5 conversions

Overall Experience

I found making a website based on a template to be more challenging than making one from scratch. I think building one from the base up is easier in the sense that I have full control and knowledge of where everything is. I have minimal web development experience since I made like a super basic not-up-to-date personal website like a year ago when I first learned html/css, so editing the files wasn’t that much of an issue. The more difficult and time-consuming part was trying to find where all the files were and what features referred to which part of the website. I particularly had difficulty making a new page because it took me a while to find where in which document contained the code for the navigation bar.

Update: the About page is having some navigation issues. It can be accessed from Home and Tags, but not from a Post page as of 7/11/2017.

What I’ve Learned

• Github
  • Updating a git repo from a terminal: prior to this class, the only way I knew how to update my website was by making manual changes to my files directly on the github website. I now feel comfortable with using codeanywhere so programming from the shell using git commands doesn’t seem so foreign to me anymore. I can see myself continuing to use github from a terminal once this class concludes because I understand it more and to be honest it looks cooler.
  • Forking repos: I’ve always heard of using github as a resource for coding, but I never made the effort to learn much about it so I appreciate how we’ve emphasized using it in class so that I can understand the concepts it entails like pulling, pushing, and branching.
  • 
• Markdown
  • I never realized how much simpler markdown is than html because using closing tags can be a bit of a hassle. I’m glad that we went over this so that I can add it to my tool belt.

What I’d Like to Learn More About

• Jekyll: I like using jekyll because it has some really nice-looking templates, but I’m still a bit fuzzy about the commands and how it hosts to the server so I plan on reading more documentation about that, but it’d be nice if we went into that a bit more in class.