The end is near

Today I was set my very last assignment on the course, which is to create an online portfolio of my work and prepare a presentation for the end of the year. A Part of me is quite happy about this being my last assignment and then another part of me is filled with dread that soon I’ll be out in the real world with no one to ask if I don’t know the answer.

With that in mind I have started to plan the last assignment with me first thinking what I would like to achieve from the project.

I would like this portfolio to show my journey throughout the course and how each assignment has stimulated and developed my knowledge along the way. The main thing I am worried about when showing my portfolio to others is that there are certain pieces of my work I don’t think show my skills at their best and so might not want employers to see. On the other hand though this work plays an important part in demonstrating my progression throughout the course.

One of the other things I have to consider when making this portfolio is that I will be doing my end of year presentation with this portfolio as my backdrop to show people what I have learnt throughout the course.

So it needs to work in two ways one for presenting my work as a portfolio and the other to assist me as a visual aid for my end of year presentation. So with this in mind I need to put quite a lot of thought into getting this to work for both.

In terms of the portfolio itself it also needs to be designed for quite a wide target audience. But the three main groups I would like to target are as follows:

• Employers – The web site needs to be of a professional standard to show future employers my capabilities and some of my best pieces of work.
• Presentation Audience – The web site needs to demonstrate to the audience what I have learned over the 2 years on the course in and easy to follow manner. It needs to show a variety of work from my best to my worst showing the challenges I have faced and how I have overcome them.
• Web Professionals – Web professionals often look at each others portfolio sites and judge that person skills by what the site looks like and the work shown on the site. For this reason I need to make the site display a wide range of skills whilst showing my best achievements.

As you can see from looking at each one of the target audiences each one has specific requirements to meet to give the best impression. For this reason the design and structure of the site needs great care and consideration.

In terms of the web site I would like it to validate to HTML 5 and CSS 3 to W3C standards. I’m still undecided if to make the web site as a static web site or content managed using WordPress. I think this is something I will decide upon once I have thought out the site design and layout.

With all this to think about I can see the last assignment being one of the most difficult and complicated of them all, so over the next few weeks I really need to think long and hard to achieve the end result I require. Hopefully if I do this well I will have something to be proud of.

Word Count: 598

Evaluation of self managed learning plan.

The summary of my journey of learning PHP is that it has proved a lot more challenging than I could ever have anticipated. Looking back I think I took too much on and set goals for myself too high. I would never have thought anything could be this difficult to learn and cause my so much frustration and sleepless nights.

As I mentioned in my last journal entry I was waiting for a book to arrive which I thought would help me with my PHP contact form. On arrival of the book it looked promising, how wrong could I have been. I wasted three very long days looking through the book and following each instruction that I hoped would help me with my contact form. I would never have thought that a forward or backward slash in the wrong place would cause me this many problems. I had looked at the tutorials for so long they were all beginning to merge into one. After hours of getting angry with myself and it, I found it didn’t do what I originally thought and it wasn’t secure. This was one of my requirements.

After scouting through hours of various tutorials and getting more and more stressed as whatever I looked at didn’t seem to be what I wanted. At this point I resorted to compiling my own from using various sections found in different tutorials.

My image uploader and gallery went a lot more smoothly apart from a couple of errors which I managed to sort out with a little bit of help.

I went on to design my website, which I have to admit was the quickest I had ever designed a website. This is not to say that I didn’t spend much time on it, on the contraire I put a lot more time into it than normal.

Next step came the html coding. I was tired and getting myself worked up as I was making really stupid mistakes that I wouldn’t ordinarily make, well maybe I would sometimes. I remembered the advice given by my tutor who said to take a break from my work and get a few hours sleep. When you wake up then you should be able to continue with a fresh approach. So I took the advice.

Getting up at 4am to start my course work again was hard as I just wanted to turn back over and go back to sleep. I knew I had a deadline to meet so had to get my act together.

Baring in mind I have never done HTML 5 or CSS 3 before and also found that I was running out of time to learn it as I would have liked. This meant that I would have to try to learn it as I went along, which I wouldn’t advise.

While I found that HTML 5 was ok to work with, but I couldn’t say the same for CSS 3. On learning CSS 3 I encountered many problems; it was a nightmare and I was struggling to get it to do what I wanted. Just when I thought that I had finished I thought I would test my website in Internet Explorer. My worst nightmare had come true, I found that it displayed completely different. I spent hours searching the internet for some kind of clue as to how to fix it with no luck. I posted a message on twitter and got a lot of reply’s but none of the solutions worked. At this point I was about to admit defeat when someone posted a link to an article by smashing magazine. This article explained that I needed to link to a java script file. This instantly fixed all my problems with Internet Explorer.

I took the w3schools.com PHP test again and scored 15 out of 20. From looking at my scores from this test and the one I took at the beginning of learning PHP you can see a remarkable improvement.

Although I feel I have learned a lot, I still think I have a lot more to learn before I can say that I’m confident in using PHP.

Word Count: 686

Learning PHP

To say that I have been busy since my last entry is a bit of an understatement. When I originally chose PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) I thought it would be something that I would pick up really quickly, but the truth of the matter is I found it a lot harder than I could have ever imagined.

I started out by downloading Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP (MAMP) and installing it, this went really well and was installed in no time at all. But as soon as I opened the application I encountered some problems:

• How do I use it?
• Where do I put my PHP files?

I had no idea at all, after playing around with the software for a couple of hours I wasn’t getting anywhere and still had no idea what I was doing. At this point I started searching the Internet to see if I could find anything that would help me, after quite a lot of searching I came across a video by css-tricks.com answering all the questions I needed to get me started.

From there I went straight to the official PHP web site php.net and tried to follow one of their tutorials. I was having no luck, as I just didn’t understand what the tutorial was saying or what it was asking me to do. So after about 2 hours of trying I gave up on it and went onto the second web site I said I would use in my self managed learning plan(SMLP) W3Schools.com. Straight away I found the tutorials easier to follow and the web site explained things in a way that I could understand, I continued to follow these tutorials for a couple of weeks and was quite happy doing so. It was only when a friend asked me one day in a lesson what some things meant I had to admit I didn’t know the answer, at this point I started to get a little worried. I looked back at most of the tutorials I had completed on the W3cschools web site and didn’t have a clue how I had done them or what half of the code meant.

At this point I decided it would be a good idea if I started again from the beginning using the Build your own Database Driven Website book by Kevin Yank. I started following the tutorials and found it a lot more explanatory than the previous web sites I had accessed and actually started to understand what some of the code did.

As I was working my way through the book I started to make my own notes explaining what things did in simple terms for reference incase I couldn’t remember, however I found the book explained everything as it went along it even explained why it did it that way.

I wasn’t very far into the book before I started to learn MYSQL and to use this to create a database with tables to store information in. This was something that I found really enjoyable and quite easy to learn as the syntax was so simple for example to add data to a table it was as simple as:

• INSERT INTO table_name SET
  Column_one_name = “value”,
  Column_two_name = “value”,

Using this the book I then went on to create a content management system (CMS) based on a Jokes database. It started out being very simple just allowing users to add their own jokes and then with time grew to be become more and more complex, allowing authors to be added/edited and deleted. Jokes being added to categories and allowing categories to be added/edited and deleted.

Managing to create the full CMS gave me quite a sense of achievement and left me feeling quite proud of what I had managed to create, even if I had done it following the tutorials in a book.

Joke CMS – Try it yourself

I could now read large sections of code and knew what it did and could even look through sections of code and fix any problems that have occurred.

However due to the amount of time I had wasted at the start doing online tutorials then drifting from web site to web site and finally to a book. I found I was running out of time to learn much more PHP so I thought it would be best to focus on learning what I would need to create my final web site as part of my SMLP.

I had stated in my SMLP that I would create a secure contact form, I was pretty confident that I could create a contact form that would gather the information and send it to an email address but to make it secure I didn’t know where to start. So I looked through the book hoping to find something that would tell me what I would need to do but with no joy.

At this point I started searching online and looked at many tutorials and tried around 3 or 4 but none did exactly what I needed. It was at this point that a friend pointed out the book PHP 6 & MYSQL 5 by Larry Ullman had exactly what I needed. I wasted no time and ordered it straight away but by the time it had finally arrived I had run out of time and I needed to start the final project in my SMLP.

So it looks like I’m going to have to try to learn it while I create the final project which wasn’t really what I wanted to do. Weather that works out or not I don’t know but we will see in my next entry.

Word Count: 938