willdarcywebauthoring-blog

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For my final post, I wanted to leave an idea of how code can be used for so much more than personal or proffesional gain. There are dozens of groups around Ireland that meet to code in an effort to help people.

Code For Ireland meet on a regular basis and work with the government to code and develop tools to increase people’s quality of life.

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A stunning example of responsive web design in an attractive package

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UI and UX

During my product design undergraduate degree I spent a reasonable amount of time working on the UI for my thesis project, a diabetes management system. Whilst working on this design I formed arguably bad habits around developing successful user interfaces.

Since then I have been trying to follow the basic fundamentals of Google’s Material Design thinking.

Available online for everyone to use and study it’s invaluable.

https://material.io/design/foundation-overview

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/ux-basics

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Tips and tricks

As with some of my previous posts, during my time developing my WordPress site I found myself searching for anything I could find to help me along the way.

https://www.wpbeginner.com/ this site was a great help.

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My wordpress experience

As with most tasks during this Web Authoring module, it’s my first time attempting to use these systems and technologies. WordPress was no different and was not without its problems.

There were several problems I ran into while making this site. The most difficult to overcome was a persistent issue with transferring files from my local storage to the remote Knuth server through FileZilla, after hours of problem solving, I traced the issue to a set-up problem with the file structure on my machine. It turned out to be a simple resolve to a problem that presented itself as a far more complex one.

Further down the line whilst trying to create the child theme for the Airi parent theme I was getting a reoccurring issue in the WordPress dashboard stating the theme was installed but broken, not allowing me to activate the theme. The problem was in a line of my CSS for the airi_child theme I had capitalised the A in Airi where it needed to be a lower-case letter for the child theme to be able to locate the required CSS file within the parent folder.

Overall WordPress was a wonderful technology to use and has clear benefits, I feel using it without the Knuth server would help shed more light on its true potential.

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Your device is not supported

This week, I was lucky enough to be granted funding from the HSE for a Dexcom G6. The G6 is a continuous glucose monitoring system or CGM - a small senor worn on the skin of a diabetic patient that constantly reads and reports the blood sugar levels of the patient to their phone. These systems are a huge step up in care and vastly improve the efficiency of treating diabetes.

The system runs through an app, “For iPhone and Android” except that’s not true. There is a limited number of devices that are actually supported by the app, if you’re not on the list you simply get a “Your device is not supported” screen with no obvious work around. For people paying for the Dexcom system privately it comes at a cost of €210/month with an additional €250 every third momth - to be told they can’t use the app.

Things didn’t look good until I found this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/diabetes/comments/klf8sj/oc_build_your_own_dexcom_app_update_base_version/

The author of this post has decompiled the Dexcom G6 app and provides a service to effectively build your own Dexcom app by picking and choosing what features you would like and not like, allowing you to remove the compatability restrictions. You then get an .apk emailed to you and it works flawlessy.

The possibilities of coding are endless and help so many.

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A new way of learning

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who learns best by doing as opposed to reading/listening - that was until I began to use podcasts as a way of pointing myself in the right direction when it comes to learning Web Authoring.

So far I’ve found the Stack Overflow Podcast to be a nice balance.

https://open.spotify.com/show/0e5eoM6w7eW9Wu7wMA04Tr?si=pMwPpbL2S2SF0G1Bpjh_Lg

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Something to look into

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to familiarise myself with the CSS grid as method of systematically designing websites - this articel from Chris House has been great to peak my interest.

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/

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Is this what succes looks like?

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Assignment issues

This week I took advantage of a smaller work load at my job to jump into the first assignment for Web Authoring in coding a website in HTML and CSS. Due to how new I am to coding I took it slow and worked my way from the top of the page going element by element in what seemed to me to be the most logical way through the site. Things were going well until I began trying to format the footer with the text on the left and image on the right - no matter what I tried the image would disappear, the text would loop funny, the image was too big or too small. Nothing would work.

After what felt like hours of research and debugging I found a website with exactly what I needed to fix the issue. This site has now become my go to for any issues I’m running into during this journey.

https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_class_float.asp

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My new found basic understanding of HTML has given me a fresh set of eyes when it comes to looking at website for example this section of code taken from the reddit.com homepage. It fascinates me that a website with daily traffic as high as reddits is relatively simple to understand once it’s broken down into its component pieces and individual lines of code.

Next onto CSS.

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A beginning in code

For me, working with code has been something shrouded in mystery for a longtime. In my undergraduate degree in Product Design we very briefly touched on it but it was neither detailed or interesting enough for me to really have paid much attention. It was not until during a post-graduate program with Enterprise Ireland where I found myself working on UX designs for a project that code began to seem like something I should be looking at - add living with two working developers code became a regular conversation that I wasn’t a part of.

As I near the end of my first course on freecodecamp.org I can feel myself becoming more involved and interested.