Trials in Snake Charming

So my data structure for my project is nearly complete.  I have classes for users, comic images, comic series, and collections.  Thanks to Django they are all interconnected with the proper keys in sql.  I’m going to step away from the backend stuff for a while and focus on the CSS and HTML code for the site.  I will keep you posted.

Hey loyal readers!   Sorry for the long hiatus.  April was a busy month for my other job.  I spent may boning up on HTML and studying wireframing.  I successfuly wireframed the UI for Funnypages and I’ve created the file and directory structure for the HTML.  Next I need to put the CSS files in the right place and code the HTML and CSS for the site, in addition to programming any functionality from my wireframe that doesn’t exist in my code yet.  Onward!

Just completed my “quiz” for 6.00.1x.  It’s really more like a midterm.  It took me roughly 4 hours to complete and holy cow, two of those problems, both of which involved debugging or completing recursive algorithms, were real mindbenders.  I powered through them though and finished with a 98%!  Feeling really good right now.  The past year of effort I’ve put in is bearing fruit.  It’s a hell of a feeling and if you are on the fence about joining me, what are you waiting for?  You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain

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Good evening friends. This is my first update in a month and with good reason. At the suggestion of a friend and mentor of mine, Jody Brookover, I signed up for the winter session of 6.00.1x, which is edx’s offering of MIT’s intro to computer science using python course.

edX, for those not familiar, offers auditable online courses from top universities on many fields including those related to math, science, and engineering. You can take these courses for free or pay a little money for certification. In some cases you can even pay a couple thousand dollars and take them for real course credit complete with a harvard transcript.

I will be adding edX to my road to success tab. My growth during the last three weeks of the 6.00.1x course has been exponential. For the first time I am feeling truly confident that I know the fundamentals and can read python code clearly without any outside aids.

I will be working on my project again next week alongside my “classroom” training so expect some new updates on funnypages and a return of Monday night coding sessions, most likely on the 24th.

My motherboard blew up not to long ago.  I got to make myself very familiar with reinstalling linux and using git to pull down a full backup of your project, so it actually worked out pretty well!  In tonight’s coding session we got pyscopg, a module that lets Django communicate with postgres databases, working again.  We also added the django-annoying module to correct some issues keeping the server from reactivating correctly.

My next step in this process is to research wireframing, which is a way of sketching out interface designs before actually coding them.  Now that my app can display comics, I have to make them look nice and nest them in an intuitive interface.  Also, tomorrow the MITx intro to python online class begins.  Lots to look forward to in the coming weeks!

We did Monday night coding on Thursday this time, but lets not get bogged down in semantics.  Exciting news to report!  My app is in a pre-alpha state at this point.  I can enter a comic series, manually attach images to that series with publication dates, and I have a few and a template that will loop through each comic series and return the latest comic image for that series on the same webpage.

My next task is to work on making that output look pretty, so it’s CSS work for me in the coming days and weeks.  Time to move forward!

Another fruitfull evening with my brother. I updated my object that stores comic images to include timestamps. This will allow me to pull only the latest comic when creating the page where you view the comics. Also we worked a bit on my HTML template for that view. Next I’m going to create a view that returns the file field string for the latest comic and create the cron job I mentioned in my last post. Things are moving!

Did some research today and found a solution to my need of pulling image content from a target website on a schedule. There is an api called Cron that lets you schedule “Cron jobs” that do exactly what I need.

So my two new short term goals are to implement Cron into my funny pages project, and to figure out a view that presents my images on a clean, easy to read page.

Eric agreed to spend each Monday night helping me kickstart a new week of coding. Tonight with his help I set up a github repository for funnypages, activated the admin page, and repaired my media root. I’ll spend the rest of the week looking for a way to check sites for updates and grab their images.

In between gorging on leftovers and messing with my new Xbox, I got a good bit of django work in. I now have a much stronger understanding on how url files, views, and html templates work in concert in a django app. I’m also starting to visualize how this will work in my funnypages app. I’m feeling good about having some kind of alpha version of the site running by the new year!