Even More Coding

Intro

My goodness, what a jam-packed last two and a half weeks. That was absolutely bonkers.

Projects

I've been working on a bunch of new projects recently, mostly in web development. I started doing a lot of work in JavaScript over the past two weeks trying to get some cool things done.

Portfolio

Firstly, I added a bunch of new features to my portfolio website (I actually added a new button for my portfolio in the header). For a long time I wanted to be able to change the color scheme of the site. This is a sort of show-offy thing to do to kinda showcase my ability and promote myself. The portfolio site is essentially an advertisement for what I can do.

Anyway, creating a random color generator took a little bit of actual programming to make. I stored all the hexadecimal values (letters A-F and numbers 0-9) in an array, and then created a loop that ran six times, each time generating a random number from 0-15 which drew that same-numbered element out of the array. A little concatenation later, and we have a random hexadecimal color. Here's the code:

var letters = ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9];

function getColor() {
    "use strict";
    var j, first, newcolor = "#";
    for (j = 0; j < 6; j++) {
        first = Math.floor(Math.random() * letters.length);
        newcolor += letters[first].toString();
    }
    return newcolor;
}

It's pretty simple, and the "use strict"; is a variant of JS that is used to restrict JS in the browser. It affects arguments, how variables are used, basic semantics, and converts mistakes (like mistyped variables) into errors in the IDE or browser. This method is called in the jQ file that changes backgrounds, borders, and displays when each of the buttons are clicked.

Finally, a chance to mention Brackets - this is my IDE for JS, HTML, and CSS (I use TextPad and DrJava for Java). It's written in HTML and CSS, and offers a great deal of functionality. It has live editing, multiple file views, awesome plugins like JSLint, Emmet, Markdown editors (useful for Github; this editor also has Github flavored markdown as a language option), and tons of great themes that are readily available.

/rant

After all this, I wrote a bunch of jQ to make sure everything changed colors correctly, everything faded correctly, and (the best part) added animations to the hover menu. AND BUTTONS - a sexy amount of buttons.

The Date Time

While I was making my changes to the Portfolio website, I stumbled upon a text clock on the /r/webdev subreddit. I thought it was exceptionally cool and it was a chance for me to learn more JS and integrate jQ into it, so I embarked on the project. It took about 4 hours, but I finally got it done - the Date Time. It's a Blogspot-hosted site (as I don't want to pay for a domain and just want to showcase something small I've made), and it's even simpler than the Portfolio. It's almost as much JS as it is HTML, and it's honestly really cool to me. I used a really long switch() statement to assign each day or month name a time and place to change. Then, I wrote this little diddy

setInterval(function () {getTime(); makeMonths(); }, 1000);

which says that each method (which calculate the date/time from the  Date() object and displays it and the switch() for assigning days and months, respectively) will be called every second. This is only necessary for the getTime() function, as that's the only one that calculates seconds.

This was a nice project to work on and really fun to do (albeit a bit tedious at times) and I'd do it again for something even cooler.