CPJ Internship Blog

Starting out week 4, I feel as though we accomplished a lot on the Group Project last week and are on schedule to get it done. Right now I am behind on the html version of the News website that I designed in Fireworks last week. I plan on working on that today to get it all caught up.

This course so far has been challenging in finding a balance between CPJ related work and Internship work. Right now, we are currently working together on setting aside designated times during the day to work on CPJ stuff and group Internship stuff, with individual work time decided on our own.

edit: Oh yeah, over the weekend I began reading one of the ebooks on HTML5 and also watching Lynda.com videos on JavaScript. I plan on watching more Lynda.com videos during this week also.

This week we spent time learning Fireworks. The picture above is an example of a news site that I created using Fireworks. I found this program useful because it does stuff that I have been trying to do in other programs, that I now know I should have been using Fireworks for. Kelli and I created the layout for the ORG site using this program together, it gave us a way to communicate ideas and see how they would look before we invested a bunch of time into the html layout. This is also a quick and easy way to see if design wise weather an idea will work or not. Sometimes an idea will play out in your head, but once it is on the computer screen it either looks completely different or is nonfunctional. Right now, I am working on creating my own Fireworks program for the Cooper Point Journal website which I will be hosting on Heroku.

This week has been busy so far catching up with the days we have missed last week with the snow fall. We have been working on the redesign of the Org site for CPJ. So far we have come up with a wire frame outline that is functional and also a design in fireworks that looks good and will separate the Org site from the main CPJ site.

I’m actually excited that I got to use my first practical application for what we have been learning in class. The place I workout at keeps an online update of the workouts we do and posts them every day. Well, with the power being out and lack of internet, they have asked me to do it during this time. Updating the website is very similar to what we have been learning in class, and if they would have asked me to do this a couple of weeks ago, I would have had no idea how to even begin.

Here is a link to the website I have been helping out with:

Crossfit Olympia

On the Crossfit section of this page I have been updating the Workout of the Day (WOD) with a picture and description. I also went through and formatted the text so it’s easier to read. It’s nothing too major, but it is still using stuff that I have learned from doing this class.

Well, I have been snowed in without power the last couple of days, fun. I have been without internet up until a few hours ago. I used my Netbook to keep my phone charged and didn’t charge my eReader before the power went out. However, what I did get done these last few days was to read through the DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model book that I have. I’m still quite a bit fuzzy on JavaScript, but I am looking forward to going over it. This weekend I will be spending locked up getting caught up on all the stuff I wasn’t able to do without a computer.

During week one we spent most of our time getting things setup and working on all the computers that we will be using this quarter. We also spent a lot of time discussing what we would be working on during the quarter.

We have had a lot of good ideas being brought up that could be added to the website but not the knowledge to implement them. This will be a good opportunity to do some house work and clean up the website and make it more fun to use for the student body.

Towards the end of week 1 we also talked about our first 3 week project which will be focused on reorganizing the .org site. I am the leader for this project and have been brainstorming ideas and drawing up plans of what we can do to make it better.

There has been a lot to learn, because even though I am familiar with the basics of html and css, there is a lot of stuff that we are covering that I am not familiar with at all. This has been a challenge but I am catching on, not as quickly as I had hoped though.