Journal - Reflection

In high school, way back in the 80’s, I learned Pascal in a class and loved it!  I thought it was really cool that I could put in code and this picture would appear.  It came easily to me and I enjoyed it.  At the time, it didn’t seem like something to pursue, I guess because it was a time when computers weren’t prevalent. 

Flash forward a couple of decades and I am taking a web design class and loving it.  Don’t get me wrong, it is challenging for me, but I feel like I am in my zone of proximal development and learning with a lot.  All of the bits and pieces are coming together and making sense.  A true sign of this to me is that I am able to trouble shoot code and understand it.

One of the hardest assignments for me were the Jen’s kitchen assignments, it was challenging for me to link to other recipes and back to the home page.  This really helped me with understanding file structure and how I want to organize my files, as well as understanding the necessity of having a consistent file naming system.  One example at http://www.csupomona.edu/~lthester/512/bookexercises/ch6_files/ex6-7%20index.html

The most rewarding assignment so far, because it too was challenging for me, has been the final Tuscany page for ch.7.  It is just such an aesthetic pleasure to have linkable thumbnails and back to home links that work. (That sounds really geeky!)  The challenging part of this assignment was the way I had the files stored and the names I gave them.  At some point I changed the names or moved the images and they didn’t link anymore.  This happened a few times as I was becoming more proficient and efficient with file storage and file naming.  Example http://www.csupomona.edu/~lthester/512/bookexercises/ch7_files/

The assignment that shows my growth and that I am most proud of at this point is the last one.  I was able to make a home page out of my About Me page and link to book assignments and a page with a table that has links to my labs.  AND I was able to load it all onto the Cal Poly server with all links working.  One of my goals is to make the book links into a table with CSS as well.  I know now how I would name and organize files differently, but at this point I don’t want to change anything because it is working.  It's not fancy, but I'm proud I understood how to do it! http://www.csupomona.edu/~lthester/512/labs/first.html