Project A - Week 7

Project A, One of the first questions that came to my mind before writing the first word of code was, what am I going to write about in my website? There are lots of possible subjects. The final idea came very fast; I am in Australia as an exchange student reason why I decided to focus in my biggest hobby "travelling".

I have been studying in México programming for two yea

rs, that could maybe explain why my website is using some tools we haven't seen yet in class, like JavaScript and some other features of HTML.

In my home university I used to make websites using HTML with tables and styles, now in Australia I learned is a big mistake, but I’m always open for new ways of coding, that's why I want to learn more CSS before I go back.

One of the main ideas for my website is that I wanted it to be easy for navigation, that's why the menu on the top can show the different sections on the site, it is divided in

eight pages and one index. The scroll was made in JavaScript, I prefer using JavaScript instead of flash for this kind of navigation options because I consider myself an old school programmer, everyday I see that programming is becoming less important that how it used to be before, and the reason is because the actual software is almost doing most of the coding part.

On the index part I decided to show a mashup that show

s a yahoo map with some of the pictures I have taken in different parts of the world, this mashup was made in yahoo pipes, it works extracting the pictures from the flickr server ID, all these photos are geo tagged, which makes easier for the mashup to identify the spots.

I have to say that I am new on this thing about mashups and APIS, but after a couple days trying over and over again, finally worked!

One of the things I didn’t found about mashups is how to give them format and style, when I inserted it on my website it looks like if it wasn’t part of it.

There is another section on the menu called America, which is a complete JavaScript animation that makes a square to move every time the user clicks on one of the options showed below. In this section I took a list of flags from Google and one picture from every country, so when the user clicks on the signal next to the flag the window hides and another window with the information of the country comes out, one of the effects of the window is that when it finishes moving it makes a slight rebound that gives a more natural effect.

In the other sections which are named as continents, and the subsections named as countries I decided to add some of the pictures I have taken during some of my trips, excepting Asia which is in the list the only section where the pictures where taken from other sources.

I decided to upload the project in the server of one website I was making before because I don’t trust very much on the free hosting websites, and if I have the chance of using a normal server, I will.

Finishing this project gave me a big satisfaction, because of all the hours I dedicated for making all the code and functions, and when I test the site and it was working correctly, trust me feels very good.

Alex.