Ana Cabral

The assignment

The assignment this week was to create a student webpage in the archive, that was prepared to accommodate the student’s FabAcademy journey (weekly assignments and final project), introduce the student and his motivation for taking the course and document initial idea, inspiration and sketches for the final project.

Learning GIT

From the lecture, I did not 100% understand what GIT was necessary for and how to “run” it. So decided to check Codecademy.

Codecademy made me get familiar with the basics, the concepts of remote, pull, push, add, commit, etc. Also, it made me aware that besides a text/code editor, I would need to find the operating system's command line (in the case of Mac users, Terminal).

To install GIT, generate a SSH key and configure my username and email, I followed the step by step guide here.

GIT felt very abstract in the beginning, but is starting to feel quite familiar.

Learning HTML and CSS

As suggested in the lecture, first thing I did was to look for inspiration, look at webpages from previous FabAcademy students and inspect their code. I checked a couple of different ones, as well as how their html was written. Was particularly inspired by Nicolás Kisic Aguirre. His website looked great, and his html was very well structured.

So, started sketching my own webpage in paper, to understand how the content should be organised.

I chose to work with HTML and CSS, and keep it simple (at least to start with) and downloaded both Atom and Brackets - text/code editors.

Was not quite sure how to learn the basics of HTML and CSS, so decided to take some lessons (available for free) at Codecademy. It was really helpful, there was a good balance between theory and exercises.

I decided to have a very simple webpage. I might change my mind, but for now, I’d rather have a simple webpage, where I feel in control of the meaning of every line I write.

Time management

Building a webpage can be time consuming, specially if one tends to focus on the details. It’s just as engaging to structure and style it, as produce meaningful content for it. The main learning from this week is to always start working and testing different parts of the assignment at the same time, to get a feeling of how time consuming each task and iteration will take.

I'll keep learning HTML and CSS over the next weeks and hope to improve and add new features to my webpage.

Final project

Initial ideas for Final Project are documented here.