WHAT DID I BUILD
For my final project for NMIX 4110, I built a website that pulls data from a database and then logs the data after a user interacts with the information that is pulled.
I based this project around comparing different breeds of puppies. When you enter the puppy page, two puppies are pulled from the database.
If you click on a puppy, that puppy is put through to the next round and a new puppy is pulled.
This process continues for 5 picks, and at that time a final puppy is picked. The winning puppy receives a “votes up” on the database, and the number of other people who selected the same puppy is displayed.
As an addition, I used jQuery to fade the images out when they are clicked on.
WHAT HAVE I LEARNED
Upon completion of the puppy quiz category, I made a second category titled Kittens. The code is easily used for other applications, and I plan on adding more categories later. While it took a long time to get the code working for the puppy category, adding a new one was very easy. I learned how to manipulate the code, and ended up with a cool game.
In this project, I learned several new things. I came into it being confident in writing Bootstrap, but not really knowing how to do some of the other things that are included in the project. I first had to figure out how to set up and organize a database. From there was writing queries and calling data in the database. Then I had to style the images, which proved to be very difficult. After all that I spent hours figuring out how to apply jQuery to the images so that they would nicely fade out when clicked.
After all of that, the most important things I learned from doing this project involve trial and error and process of elimination. There were a lot of times when things broke, didn’t cooperate with what I wanted, and just didn’t work. By trying multiple ways of solving problems through trial and error I was able to work through many of the issues.
CHALLENGES FACED
As I stated above there were several bumps along the way that created challenges. The most frustrating one for me was when the images would not fit into a row. After days of looking over the code I rearranged some of the div tags that were surrounding the images, and found code left over from a part of the project that was scrapped. This code was messing with the formatting, and upon removal fixed the issue.
WHAT I’M PROUD OF
I’m proud of the entire project. I spent a lot of time on the phone and meeting with my dad to learn how to get the things I wanted completed. It was a really great bonding experience, and I’m fortunate to have had him to help me through the challenges that I ran into.
I am also particularly proud of the fade out effect on the images. This took me a lot of research to figure out, and I ended up combining multiple fade effects from examples to come up with what I have. It was really cool to see it work after so many hours of trial and error.
