Week 4

Refresher: Last week, my primary goal was to create a CSS outline/wireframe, get in contact with my mentors and schedule times to talk, and start the very long process of editing and reaching out to my story sources for feedback and images (if possible).

Where am I now?

Panicking! The fifty percent mark is NEXT WEEK! (Oh, it isn’t. Thank goodness! 50% is in two weeks from today. Phew.) Honestly, I don’t think I’m in that bad of shape. I think 50% seems manageable to get to by next week. Still though, that is a pretty scary proposition. This week, I feel like I made a good amount of progress. I spent most of my time working away at the CSS (we all know how that goes. CSS is such a time drain). I also learned how to make a sticky nav with CSS and jQuery, which is pretty neat. It has a bit of a bug, which is that it “snaps” or like… vanishes at a certain point before reappearing. Which I’m not a huge fan of. But I’m sure I can figure it out!

I also wrote more stories and began collecting the “facts and tips” in earnest. I need to put my head down and get those written up as well. It’ll be a LOT less work than the full stories since it’ll just be a snippet of text and then a link out to some other resource, but there are a lot of them, so I need to get moving.

This week, I also sent some emails and got in touch with some folks. One of the emails came back with bad news (one of the people I’ve been trying to interview for months is going to Saudi Arabia for two weeks, leaving…tomorrow. Neat.), but one was a success. I reached out to one of my “mentors,” Prof. David Schall, and he got back pretty quickly. We met on Monday and chatted about how the project was going. He thinks that the physical component is really interesting and is pretty key to the project (arg. To some extent I agree, but also the website is the MVP). He also suggested that I put in much more time on the CSS to make it look nice. That way, when I showed it to people, they had something to react to. This is a super good point (especially before I meet with Laurel!). He also said that he didn’t know anything about backend (darn), but had heard that Firebase was probably the way to go (yay!).

Where do I want to be next week?

I’m going to bullet out some goals. Not saying ALL of these are going to be done next week, but this is what is on my mind (not in order of priority).

• Editing and reaching out to story folks for images
  • Talk to Lillie, Hank, Gail, for more stories (not necessary, but would be cool)
  • Consider writing my own stories?
• Write up the tips and facts section
• Create a logo and “phrase” for the project
• Collect images and start optimizing them for the web
• Figure out how the tags/connections are going to work (this is probably priority one… Not sure why I haven’t noticed this rather massive logical whole before…)
• Make CSS look nicer and put it on all the pages
• Meet with Laurel and see what she thinks
• Meet with Annie and see what she thinks
• Start the lantern/box and figure out what exactly would be on that (thinking this is still a later problem)
• Populate the categories page and figure out if I’m generating “features” on the home page or not (also high priority)

Ok, now I’m feeling a little freaked. This feels like a chunky amount of work. Alright, well, break it down. What is feasible to get done by next week?

I know I’m meeting with Annie on Thursday, and I have been in touch with Laurel about meeting next week, so that is good in terms of mentor feedback.

I’d also like to focus my time on the categories pages this week. I want to build them out pretty much completely—this is make sure that the story titles are generating, and then do the CSS so it looks the way I want. This is going to be a lot of work, but I think it’ll really help push me up to that 50% mark. Also, I’d like to continue with the editing/review process. It would be awesome to have one set of stories finished and polished by next week, so I can start testing with those in firebase instead of my placeholders, story5 and storystory. Finally, I’ll probably spend some time writing up the fact snippets.

P.S. right now, the home page looks like this:

(above the crease)

(below the crease—note the fancy sticky nav!)