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In case you were also wondering about the origins of <a href="some link address">linky link</a> “A” is for “anchor”, “HREF” is for “hypertext reference” from a W3 article on making a server, by way of this place

I copied my `gem list` and `brew list` outputs to text files in Dropbox today [is the next step writing a script that installs the listed packages when called?]. I then did some sort of nasty copy-and-paste job on my Sublime Text 2 settings, putting them into the Reboot folder, too. Then I came across this response to a question on Stack Overflow. It’s so much nicer & will continue to backup automagically. It’s another one of those too-rare instances where technology makes life easier. ...

Writing this in routes/api.js… exports.posts = function(req, res) { var posts = []; data.posts.forEach(function(posts, i) { posts.push({ id: i, title: post.title, text: post.text.substr(0, 50) + ‘…’ }); }); res.json({ posts: posts }); }; exports.posts = function(req, res) { var id = req.params.id; if (id >= 0 && id < data.posts.length) { res.json({ post: data.posts[id] }); } else { res.json(false); } }; [d'oh! Note the two `exports.posts`.] …and then attempting to run the Node server will through a less than helpful error: ...

Put those dang media-specific styles at the bottom of the sheet. Cascading means cascading. When inserting ZURB’s Foundation Icons, trying to write <i class="fi-social-github"></i> as <i class="fi-social-github" /> makes for some funny [in hindsight] repetition of the icons. I thought Viewport Resizer was going to save the day for iPhone testing. I thought wrong. Not directly related, but Cyberduck has a “reload” button for transfers. Sure beats clicking and dragging the same file repeatedly.

Day 35 of MakerSquare. Morning: lesson on node.js and gelato. We got a quick and dirty introduction to node, its asynchronicity, and the Express.js framework. In the span of the class, we Installed node.js and npm, the Node package manager Registered API keys with Facebook and Twitter Ran our first node.js server Ate homemade gelato - cookie dough flavor! Poked around the Jade page renderer Ran a node.js server to collect our Twitter stream Posted through the server to Facebook when “JavaScript” was mentioned in said Twitter stream Played Bomberman, as built with node.js Built a chat server Whew. ...

Day 34 of MakerSquare. Morning was perhaps our last lesson on vanilla JavaScript. We learned about prototypes and the .call method. Unique about our preparation was that Gilbert had recorded a version of the lesson as a video for us to watch the night before. I felt that viewing the video and then sleeping really primed my brain for maximum absorption. Moral of the story? Take more naps. Spent more time this afternoon on getting Mars Attracts to a solid place with the Rails portion. We’re growing our databases and are not without pains. But we hammer down the errors as they pop up and keep on developin’.

Day 33 of MakerSquare. Morning lesson was on algorithms and using Big O notation to note how long they should take to run. The basis for the lesson came from a co-founder’s conversation with a Google recruiter and her suggestions for what we should know for technical interviews. I enjoyed the lesson because ti was stretching a different, but parallel, part of the brain. Afternoon was project work. We worked on figuring out where our hackathon project had holes and how to patch them. I added dropdown menus that populate from the database. It works for now, but it looks like we’ll be restructuring our models & it probably won’t work tomorrow. Probably means it’s time to start writing tests. ...

Day 32 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Shout out to everyone else who wore a tie, especially the ladies who rocked them with dresses and blouses. Keeping it classy. Front-end: Adding ZURB Foundation to a Rails app and using Sass to write markup. In the evening, I found a blog post detailing how to incorporate custom fonts in Rails, which I’ll link later. Once again, going through Foundation, I admire the speed and ease with which I can get something looking decent, especially next to what I made before I started at MakerSquare. Not that the older stuff was bad, but writing code by hand takes a lot longer. ...

Day 30 of MakerSquare. Front-end: We covered a couple of topics today. First, we worked with a weather API to pull a JSON object using AJAX within a JavaScript tag. APIs are powerful tools, but as we saw earlier in the program when GitHub changed theirs, too fragile. Maybe APIs need a versioning system and/or a way to allow developers to test their code against updated APIs to ensure the new release doesn’t break stuff. ...

Day 29 of MakerSquare. Front-end: more jQuery and then digging into Presenters for riot.js. We continued to build our app that allows for posting and commenting on pictures of animals. Our directive today was to study changes in the code and then add a feature to tally the total “likes” on comments for a specific picture. Back-end: Helpers of all sorts in Rails. Partials for the views and helper methods to take “the business logic” out of the views and into model helpers. Glad I completed the Hartl tutorial over the break because: seeing things a second time helps with learning, and I have a new appreciation for Haml, which we used today.