Speedrun — project №1
Finished first project two nights ago, and what I evaluated as a 3–4 hours long project became 8 hours of intense googling, crawling through Stackoverflow and Javascript documentation.
For my first project I’ve chosen to make tribute page for “Emperor of Imperium of man and mankind” from Warhammer 40k lore, made a few sketches before I started writing code and when I was satisfied started to work on HTML and CSS part of the page.
I included bootstrap in my code , just because of jumbotron, and containers and rows for gallery part of the page, finished the first two sections in no time, but then the hard part of the project started.
I was trying to use JavaScript to make my gallery interactive, so that on click picture opens in popup with a few paragraphs of text alongside it, but didn’t had any idea how should I make that happen, and after an hour of research I found two JavaScript libraries that were supposed to do that ( found out too, that this feature is called lightbox ), and after tampering with them I finally decided to give Lightbox2 a chance. The problem is that picture info as default was set up to be beneath picture, and that was not going to work well with my rivers of text about Warhammer lore, so I spent another hour tampering with js and CSS files, and googling for solution until I somehow managed to resolve it just with chrome developer console, where I found out which classes were in charge of positioning text under picture, and then modifying them to work as I wanted.
Not really perfect and elegant solution, but it worked and I was satisfied with the look of it. The gallery was working as intended, and then I opened Chrome last time ( or I thought so, poor fool ) to put in information about Emperor and timeline details. In my defense, Warhammer books are on my to-read list for a while, but because of life reasons didn’t have time to start reading them, and the biggest part of my knowledge about WH40k universe was from Dawn of War games and few story books and comics intended for board games, I knew that Warhammer lore is HUGE but I didn’t know that it is this much huge, and by that I mean really, really HUGE. Just WH40k Wikia have around four thousand articles about lore, and there is Lexicanum library with 18.000(!) articles and even 1d4chan 40k page with around 2000 articles. So I spent another hour or two trying to condense information about rise and fall of the Emperor into 7 paragraphs, in a way that can make sense and without holes between events.
The final product was not exactly how I imagined it but I’m satisfied with the result, and still know that it can be much, much better. Next project is going to be a portfolio, and after that, I’m going to spend a few days learning about DOM manipulation and practicing a bit, before I move on to harder and more JavaScript based projects.
Thanks for reading, I’ll be writing again in a day or two(or three) to post about my next project.
