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.
