So, it's been a while...
A bunch of you have asked why I haven't posted my site. I'd been meaning to update a few things that I wasn't thrilled about with my final project. But life happened, and I haven't been able to fix the issues. So here's what I'm going to do...
DISCLAIMER: It probably looks like crap in IE browsers. It is not responsive on mobile, the way I wanted it to be, so don't look at it on your phones. Check it out in Chrome or Safari at a standard browser window size and you should be good to go ;}
I know you normally don't get to tell people how they should look at sites on the internet. And I really do plan on figuring these issues out. I've just been busy with new work and haven't been able to tackle them just yet. You understand.
Overall, I was really happy with how the site turned out. Staying true to my old college habits, I was up until 3am the night before my final class. It was a ton of work, but well worth it. I was able to build a site that was sharable, fun to make, and is (hopefully) something you'll enjoy.
The site tells a tale by Exquisite Corpse. I started the story with one line and sent it to a friend. After they came up with the next line, I sent only their line to another friend, and so on...
Slowly a story came to life. Parts of it are a little weird, but that was the point. I also branched the story a few times to give you four possible experiences. It sounds a little complicated, but I promise, it's not. You'll have fun.
So go check it out! Tell me what you think! http://exquisitestory.bitballoon.com/
The last few weeks of class were really great. They were fun and challenging, and to be honest, I wish they had gone on a little longer. I got to know my instructors and classmates better, and I really appreciated the time I spent with them.
In our final weeks we covered a lot of fun topics, all of which I am excited to keep practicing.
Here's a high level overview of what I learned:
Responsive Basics
We learned the difference between fluid and Myfixed layouts, and how to control the appearance of layouts on different screen sizes by writing media queries in our CSS. In our lab for this class, I successfully created a page that shifted its columns, removed certain elements, and used a collapsed navigation based on the screen size of the browser.
Advanced CSS Positioning
This lesson covered the difference between static, relative, absolute, and fixed positioning of page elements. This allows elements to be placed exactly where we want them, and setting a value for the "z-index" of an element determines what elements are on top of each other. For those of you who are familiar with the program, this is similar to layers in Photoshop.
CSS Transitions and Transformations
Here we learned how to animate and move elements of the webpage without having to write lots of javascript. CSS is much friendlier than javascript to me, so it was good to learn that I could make things look and function better with just some CSS.
Overall, I loved my time at General Assembly. My instructor and classmates were great, and I feel like I gained experience that I wouldn't have been able to on my own. I am by no means an expert, but I am able to help the other developers at my company by styling the elements of my design as they get the back end and framework of pages set up. They don't have to do as much work, and I end up with web pages and apps that are more inline with my initial creative ideas. I really enjoy front end web development and look forward to practicing it throughout my career.
