Project: French and Latin Promotional Sites
Client /Prof: Mike Heidenreich
Completion status: Started October 10th 2019
Staff guidance: None
STA team members: Thuy
Description/plans: Code-up two simple websites to promote online Latin and French classes (like the one I did for Russian a couple of months ago)
To be completed: A couple of weeks

Updates on WP Maintenance

I’m still working on the WP scripts with Stacy. Since the last time I posted I finished the add-user script to be able to add a specific user to a batch of WordPress sites.

After finishing up that script I noticed that some of the arguments that these commands are going to need will be similar. For example, the user will always need to specify a site or group of sites to run the command on. This is why I decided to create a “parent” script that will act as a middleman for all commands. You can run that script and give it the command you want to run and on what pages as an argument. It will then do some preprocessing work and then call some other script using PHP’s ‘include’ or ‘require’ keyword. This is a much more organized way of coding everything up since it will save me the work of writing the same code for different scripts.

Last time I met with Stacy he also told me to make a script to initialize and deploy a new website from scratch. This basically involves installing the latest version of WordPress, setting up Git, creating some common users, and setting the LAITS preferred website and database configurations. It sounds more complicated than the other scripts that he asked me to ask. I will start working on it later later this week and the next.

SPRING 2020 DIGITAL SCREEN AD

I have been working on putting together a screen ad for the liberal arts department as seen in one of my last recent posts. Below is the feedback I got after sending my drafts over on basecamp. The images under the feedback are the edits I made which involved messing around with the values and saturation of the background. Personally I like the lighter color image with the background more visible. It alludes to class registration more clearly.

Project: Hebrew Flash Conversion
Client/Prof: Professor Raizen
Completion Status: Unfinished, Unknown ETA
Staff Guidance: Kevin/Valerie
STA Team Members: Estella, Kevin
Description/Plans: Convert all flash interactives created into another format retaining the same information.

The current stage we are at is decompiling and extracting all hebrew text from said modules and reproducing the interactives in a variety of different formats to determine which is best suited for the content of these activities. I created an interactive quiz in both Quia and Quizlet. What I determined is that Quia is more flexible in structure of quizzes, allowing deliberate formatting and organization of quizzes. This allows the activities to be more accurate to their original flash counterparts. Although Quizlet is more popular and easier to use, it lacks the depth required to recreate these interactives like Quia does.

Quia:

Quizlet:

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2019/10/09/29289-2/

Hi,

Recently I’ve been working a bit on Cascade training, namely learning how to use HTML/CSS to create more advanced content such as tables, embedded videos, and pull quotes. I’ve also learned a bit about beekeeping since my Cascade page is themed around bees (why, I have no idea!) Here’s what it looks like.

I also got the chance to mess around with Photoshop a bit to create the bee-themed icons. Check out some of those videos by the way. They’re terrifying yet fascinating at the same time 🙂

Aside from that bee-siness (ha), I got a high-level overview of WordPress and its theme functionality from Stacy. I also set up MAMP and WordPress on my personal laptop and cloned the entire Life and Letters database+content onto my local machine! It was pretty cool to learn about how WordPress utilizes a SQL database in order to keep all the configs like account information, plugin settings, and content. I don’t have too much experience with databases, so this project should be an interesting opportunity to learn more about those technologies 🙂