Major Activities of the Day: Today we had lots of chill time, so I focused on moving ahead with my project. And by that, I mean that I spent 2 hours putting together a logo. It was kind of tough to find free software, and it's a raster image rather than what it should be - a vector image (faster to load and scales without going grainy) - but it's something, and the logo just isn't the main point here. (Which is why I spent 2 hours on it. Um...) I added some frontend stuff, including tabbed content, which Foundation gives you right out of the box. (Oh, to be clear, I'm using Zurb Foundation - I decided not to go the standard Twitter Bootstrap route, because I imagine I'll eventually learn Bootstrap, and Foundation looks pretty cool, so I may as well get to know it. We'll see how it goes!)
As an aside, I learned a bit today about being open to changing directions. I originally started out imagining a multi-page form with lots of controller actions to handle each step of the process. Then I realized I could just have a tabbed form - hey, that's much nicer! It's better from lots of perspectives - easier for the user (if they don't know about X, they can move on to Y and come back easily), and easier for me, the programmer (because I can just write one big controller action). That's where tabs came in. I didn't want to have lots of stuff appearing at one time on the page - things need to be organized, simple, attractive, and not overwhelming - so I kept it clean by showing only one piece of the form at once, using tabs. Of course, I've only done the first part of the form, which is the easy part, just inputting names and email addresses. The next parts will involve dynamically updated content, so basically I'm spending this weekend studying jQuery and Ajax, and hoping I can accomplish what I want to accomplish.
In the afternoon, we went over the Arel exercise from earlier this week, and then I had more time for project work.
Today was my first Feeling Friday. (I'm an Orthodox Jew, so until this week when the days are longer, I had to leave early on Fridays to get home in time for the Sabbath.) Essentially, everyone gathers in a big circle and we share our feelings about the week. It was kind of neat to hear how everyone else feels, and hear that I'm not the only one who's gotten a bit stressed out about how much work we're doing!
Skills developed: Using a CSS/JS design framework (Zurb Foundation), flexibility in design
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