Day 18: Checked forms, google maps API
>>> Brief overview
I started the day by cleaning up my login/signup form-checking so that the login and signup buttons are disabled unless all information entered is correct. There are approximately a google ways to do this, but I stuck with my .changes on my form inputs, because really if you’re blurring around any other part of the form you’re probably confused, and it’s a small form. I left an easter egg in there so if I ever deploy Athena and you’ve read this blog post and you are so inclined to sign up and try ‘er out, think about apples :)
Then I officially gave up on Mapbox and switched over to using Google maps. I wouldn’t say it’s any easier, but I like the docs a lot more, and the internet in general seems to know quite a bit more about it, which feels empowering to me, somehow. Then I began a serious exercise in “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” I think I can, I guess.
>>> Where I struggled
First off, there are no polygons of the world continents saved as KML files that I could find. I hunted for ages, then I tried convering .shp files using a creaky shapeescape converter, I read a ton of Fusion Table forums and examples from other people using the API for similar reasons, and after literally 3 hours of going back and forth about polygons, I broke down and made my own. You can see them here, I think. Anyway, they look like this:
Then, hark! It looks like you can import those polygons into a Fusion Table!
And fusion tables in Google Maps should (I think) behave like a mini database that your JavaScript can read through and make polygons out of in the FusionTablesLayer!
And you’d figure, you know, that since I used a Google Maps tool to make a Google Fusion Table to be read by the Google Maps API, that these things might be able to read themselves. But no, my fusion table map mockup looks like this:
What. What?
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
I fell asleep at the kitchen table last night while I was poking around at this, next to a few clementine peels and a half-empty Spindrift seltzer. Sort of white-girl punk rock, and sort of sad. And for the first time since I started this project, I didn’t write my blog post before midnight. That was a mistake, because even though I’m writing it now, I would have benefited so much more from taking a break to reflect yesterday. As my dad often remarked to me in my more rambunctious college years, nothing great happens after midnight.
Best to call it a night around then, and not give away tomorrow’s morning to last night. So you can begin again, at the beginning.
