Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Digital_Humanities, Weekly Update 12/1

This past week was a pretty notable week for failure blogs. Not only was I having trouble even completing the smallest command with Python, during my presentation, I realized that I forgot to format my website to a standard size so it will display correctly. If ever there was a moment where I felt like I had egg on my face, it was then.

But, it is the final week of the semester, so there is hardly room to let this hold me back. After struggling for hours on trying to get Python to do something, I finally managed to get it to replace some typos in a text file of a manuscript. I don't think I've ever felt more accomplished, to be honest. I don't entirely know what I was doing wrong, but I figure it was in the way I was going about trying to put the code in and get it to do what I wanted to do.

My first mistake was trying to do too much at once. For this portion of my portfolio, I forgot that the majority of our contributions must be done in small parts. Every step definitely counts and is definitely needed in order to make sure it goes through alright and accomplishes the assignment. So, after struggling with that very notion that I had to slow down and take it piece by piece, it was a lot of trying to figure out what string of code actually worked and what would be best to try to accomplish my goal. Of course, it involved a lot of Google searches for trying to figure out the benefits of opening a file in writing versus reading mode, for example.

As for the formatting on my website, I am still trying to go through to get it to work. Unfortunatley, "vw" and "vh" as recommended in class are not yet compatible for other browsers, so I've been removing width and height specifications and using percentages where I need to instead of pixels. It still is ridiculously stressful and takes far too long, in part because it displays fine on my laptop, but I have to constantly go back and forth between that laptop and an older one owned by my family to see if it shows up alright. I've gotten mixed results, but I suppose so long as it isn't too wonky, it will pass for now. It is rather hard to let things go, however, mostly because I've worked in graphic design before and as a naturally organized (and slightly Type A) person, it's hard for me to not want all elements of the page to align perfectly. I chose the design of my website for organization and aesthetic purposes, but it seems that choice is shooting myself in the foot.

Either way, I'll have things ready by the end of the week. It is just taking longer than usual to try to get everything fixed and redo a lot of my CSS code.

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