July 3, 2015

 I slept through the morning but I managed to read a textbook chapter and a half before lunch. And then I never made it back to reading. There is always tomorrow.

I did other school-related stuff, though. My group has decided on a website to redo so I went to the website and made a site map so we would have a better idea of how many pages we would need to make. Then, I actually made a file for each page and basically put in the bare bones or scaffolding for each page. I added the basic code along with the menu for each page, adjusting the code slightly on that for each page so the CSS could manipulate each menu differently. This way everyone will be starting with the same layout and adding in whatever is specific to that page. I figured doing it this way will add consistency across the pages in the HTML and will also make it easier for the CSS portion when we want everything to look the same. I thought it would quickly become a nightmare if we are all coding different pages in different ways and then tried to combine them. So I cut and pasted the basic code from the site I made, modifying it where I needed to. I also made the CSS page, putting in a lot of the basic stuff, and I made a basic menu, turning the list I had on each page into horizontal buttons. More tweaking will have to be done to that in terms of colors and possibly overall appearance but I wanted to get the code in place using the code I used for my site while it was still fresh in my mind and I still had a general idea of how to do it.

All of that took me a couple of hours but for me it was a pretty major effort. Not in terms of physical effort but just getting overall that initial hump. Starting something is always my biggest obstacle and now I've gotten that out of the way for all of us. We just need to start transferring the content over. There will still be some things to figure out along the way but, at least for me, it feels a lot less daunting now.

This is a good thing because now I could put more of my focus on my grant proposal project in my management class. I'm still tossing ideas around in my head but I need to switch over to research to see if my ideas are actually things that can be done. I have zero experience when it comes to grants or writing proposals for them. It would be cool if I could figure out a take on the common read that universities have and do it for an elementary school. My second thought it doing a summer reading program for an elementary school. We have to submit a short update on Sunday, mainly just to prove that we have put some thought into the project since we got the assignment, so I don't have to have a final topic sorted out by then, but it would be nice if I did.

Tomorrow morning we are going to have a group meeting to talk about the website project. Tonight I set up my webcam and microphone so those should be working correctly. I've never actually used them for a web conference before so hopefully all goes well. I've also never met someone online like this. We have interacted through emails and messages online but I'm kind of nervous about actually “meeting” them. I'm awkward enough when I meet new people face-to-face. But it's going to happen regardless so there's no point in worrying about it.