Week 6 (6/29 - 7/5)

It's been a good week. I finally began my return to coding. Although, it's been an interesting journey thinking about the all of the things that the remix visualization needs to do, I'm very happy to be jumping back into writing code. Granted, I don't really know haml or css, so I've mainly just been copying, pasting, testing, and editing the relevant sections of code for reorganizing the world show page.

Friday, I spent the day continuing to learn Ruby on Rails. There were a variety of guides online and Jordana also sent me the pdf book that went into more depth. That afternoon, in the meeting, I had a conversation with everyone about how I planned to integrate the remix visualization into the world show page and showed them some sketches. I received some good feed back on organizing things: Mainly, the left-to-right ordering flows better and that keeping remixes in the forefront of things should be a good thing. The tabs seemed to be a good idea because it cuts down on the clutter on the showpage. Also, organizing the remixed animations by those that have been most recently remixed, so that it is up-to-date. One interesting idea that I need to talk to Jordana about more is putting content on the stop pane after a particular video has finished playing.

Monday was spent creating sketches that incorporated the ideas that everyone came up with from the Friday meeting. They all look fairly similar since they're essentially just reorganizing the various components of the show page into something aesthetically pleasing and functional. That afternoon, I booted up netbeans and got it up and running in the correct branch. It looked very similar yet at the same time very different from Eclipse, so I played around with it for some time and took a look at the code base that was already present. 

Tuesday, I actually started to change some of the code and reorganize the code in the haml and css files for the worlds. With Mary and Reilly's help, I managed to learn a little more about the various files in the Community project. I found that by changing the fixtures, I could make any world be remixed from a different world and be remixed into another world. It provides a good place holder for the moment, until I can get some semblence of animations up and running. I'm not actually quite sure where I need to go to create those files that will store the animations or how to link them to the world show page in a particular order yet. I will  probably have to create a database to organize worlds and their remixes. I did manage to move around the world and the remixes into three columns on the show page. There are still some bugs, but I hope with a little more exploration, I will be able to work those out soon.

Wednesday was the Fourth of July! Very epic day! St. Louis's fireworks are quite amazing at the Arch. 

Thursday involved more messing with the world show page. I managed to fix some display issues that I was having. Some of the containers were not lining up with their videos and others were just being difficult to move around to the spot I wanted them in. My one major accomplishment of the day would be making the challenge entry bar on challenges auto-hidden, so it's not displayed, unless it's scrolled over. It was only a couple lines of code, but figuring out the proper places to put it and the proper way to code it took far more time than I care to admit. It looks pretty cool now though. After finishing that up, I began to try and incorporate tabs into the show page to display the info, comments, and suggested worlds without cluttering up the entire web page.