Weeks 4 and 5 — Down and back up again

Week 4 was a pretty bad week for me — (hopefully) the nadir of this course for me — so I wanted to wait till things were more positive before writing a blog post. And indeed, Week 5 has been great!

Saturday and Sunday I forked minishopify, the redone-from-scratch shopping cart app Ahmed had done, and prettified it by doing the front-end work, turning it into “the art cart”.

Then I got the idea of turning some work I had to do anyhow into a Rails app. I needed to put up a web gallery for Voix Visuelle of one of our latest shows, and what I had just done with the shopping cart seemed very applicable to a gallery. Sure it seemed overkill to use Rails for a single gallery, but it could make putting up similar future galleries quite simple. So over Monday and Tuesday I worked on Vanier Quartier Numerique. Each artist’s name is a link; clicking on the name opens up a view of the artist’s piece(s), along with names, titles, and (eventually) bio (still waiting to receive those). It still needs a bit of work — notably a more responsive design for the banner, as for now it will only show properly on a browser window that is at least 1250 pixels wide; also the copy thanking our granting agencies for their support still needs to be added.

Wednesday through Friday I went back to working on Hex, which ended up fairly complicated, and I got a lot more comfortable with Rails in the process, with of course Ahmed there to help me whenever I got too stuck. It’s 4 was a pretty bad week for me — (hopefully) the nadir of this course for me — so I wanted to wait till things were more positive before writing a blog post. And indeed, Week 5 has been great!

Saturday and Sunday I forked minishopify, the redone-from-scratch shopping cart app Ahmed had done, and prettified it by doing the front-end work, turning it into “the art cart”.

Then I got the idea of turning some work I had to do anyhow into a Rails app. I needed to put up a web gallery for Voix Visuelle of one of our latest shows, and what I had just done with the shopping cart seemed very applicable to a gallery. Sure it seemed overkill to use Rails for a single gallery, but it could make putting up similar future galleries quite simple. So over Monday and Tuesday I worked on Vanier Quartier Numerique. Each artist’s name is a link; clicking on the name opens up a view of the artist’s piece(s), along with names, titles, and (eventually) bio (still waiting to receive those). It still needs a bit of work — notably a more responsive design for the banner, as for now it will only show properly on a browser window that is at least 1250 pixels wide; also the copy thanking our granting agencies for their support still needs to be added.

Wednesday through Friday I went back to working on Hex, which ended up fairly complicated, and I got a lot more comfortable with Rails in the process, with of course Ahmed there to help me whenever I got too stuck. It’s up on Heroku now, although my background texture somehow got lost…will have to work on that.