1. 1. Commentary on Setting Up your Domain and Social media

Setting up my blog did not go well. I opted to use my current domain instead of using the Domain of One’s Own, mainly because I thought to myself, I’m a Computer Science Major I can handle this. I had run a WordPress blog on this domain before, and I didn’t remember having any trouble with it at all, so I didn’t think it would take long at all. All said it probably took me about four hours to get the blog up and running. My struggle went as follows: I used the install WordPress tool provided by my host, and what does it do? It installs over the root of my domain. I liked my main page! I want to put it in a sub-directory, however I didn’t see the option when I was going through the process.  So I try to uninstall this installation, and what does it say? It says it can’t because something to do with the SQL tables.. What? I go look in the SQL db, and all of the tables are messed up, I presumed it was from the old installation of WP, I drop all the tables, and then use some nifty SQL commands to reconstruct the database.

Then I went back to the WordPress install tool, and now there isn’t even an option to uninstall it now. I then ssh into the server and I find that my whole root directory is empty. I don’t even know why that happened. Luckily the host has a nice backup tool and I was able to get my old main page back… But wait when I go to chris-lloyd.net it gives me an error saying I’m not allowed to see this page. WhhAT?T?  I just restored all the files. I ssh into the server again and I find that no the server didn’t put up the backed up files in the same place, it put it in a sub-directory in /public/backup. Okay I think I can handle this. I get all the files in the right location, load up the page. Same error?!!?!? I can see the files right there. I then try and load chris-lloyd.net/index.html/ and that works… Why isn’t it loading the index page!?? Long story short I find out that when I accidentally installed WordPress in that directory, WordPress changed the .htaccess to point to index.php instead of index.html…. I don’t know why the backup didn’t fix this! But it didn’t! Now four hours later it all worked..

1. 2. This is my mutlimodel introduction!
2. 3. Commentary of Customizing your blog

I really enjoyed customizing my blog. As soon as I installed WordPress I knew I wanted Conway’s Game of life running in the background! Writing the Conway Game of Life code was a snap, but I saved that part for last. The real trick was editing the theme so that a HTML5 Canvas context spanned the entire background. I theme I chose was this one I choose it because I liked how minimal the implementation one. After downloading it I set to work trying to make the whole background and HTML5 context. That didn’t really take too long once I figured out the anatomy of a WordPress template. The code I wrote was pretty dirty though. I embedded the CSS and HTML5 directly into the WordPress template header file that’s included into all pages.

Then I set to work on getting a script working. Since I was working with pure JavaScript (I didn’t want to be dependent on JQuery) some of the things that should have been easy to implement were not. For example getting the mouse position… That’s quite hard, because different browsers have different coordinate systems for some reason. It can drive you insane! However once I got that working it was really easy to just write the code for Conway’s Game of Life, barring one thing. I always forget you need basically a second 2D array to act as a back buffer to save the next generation of cells, before rendering them to the screen. If you used a single 2D array you would update some cells, and then when you go to update the neighbors, they would be updating based on the new values of the neighbors, when they should have been updating based on the original ones. Once I realized I needed the second array everything fell nicely into place.

1. 4. This is how I felt about the required reading.
2. 5. Lets go on a Safari through eagle landing!
3. 6. My photo reflection is here.
4. 7. Here is my Safari Reflection!
5. 8. Here are my three daily creates, that’s 1 2 3.
6. 9. Here is my spubble.. and here our my other four visual assignments  1 2 3 4
7. 10. My introspective thoughts on this first week.
8. 11. My comments on other blogs for this week can be found here: 1 2