Web Development Update

Last November I started working on a professional website, only to go on hiatus in February before returning to the States. I didn't start working on it again until June, and I'm glad to say its nearly complete.

Since June I've exchanged my crude text holders for icons from Icomoon, by buttons for tabs and plain html for some nice hover effects. I've also added color and some jQuery to make the site interactions more dynamic. I'm still sorting out the colors, affects and some minor alignment, but the website is coming along.

Before I tune the aspects listed above, I'm working on making the website responsive. In other words, it will modify the content to fit whatever screen it's on. Mostly I'm working on creating media queries for the mobile and tablet.

So far it's been a pretty good ride. I've gotten a better hold on CSS3 transitions, bootstrap override, responsive navigation, dynamic Javascript and Jquery, with a dash of PHP for the contact form. I'm not sure I would use this site for an actual personal website at the moment, but it's been a great learning experience.

My next project will be to create a blogger template, followed by some ventures into WordPress. Wish me luck!

Web Dev: PHP Scraping & Quizes

In addition to taking a beginner-intermediate course on Udemy for PHP and MySQL, I've also been reviewing some projects I created in Rob Percival’s tutorial, The Complete Web Developer’s Course. My first run-through the PHP projects ended with quite a few errors, so I wanted to repeat the tutorials and create working demos. One of those projects I discussed last time –the PHP contact form.

WebDev Update: PHP Contact Form

For the past year or so I have been returning to an old hobby – web development. You may have remembered my earlier post about coding and second language learning. First I worked on upgrading my knowledge of CSS (now CSS3) and HTML (HTML5), with some exercises in practical JavaScript and jQuery. I've also been working quite a bit with Twitter Bootstrap. I also dabbled in Wordpress and MySQL.

For the past month I've decided to primarily focus on dressing up some PHP samples. I took the The Complete Web Developer’s Course by Rob Percival, as well as the Code Academy PHP course, but it is still my weakest link.

What Coding and Language Learning Have In Common

Back in the bygone days of Myspace I learned my first foreign language. Eager to express my "individual" pre-teen self, I scurried over to W3schools and learned enough CSS and HTML to code my own layouts. With the rise of Facebook, I gradually shifted platforms, leaving my coding experience behind until college.

As I am now brushing up on my coding skills - and learning a few new tricks, I've noticed it's much easier to figure out than when I was 13. But that has little to do with age, and more about language experience. If you know how to learn another language, you can learn to code, and vice-versa.