Yes, I Stopped To Get Directions

Greetings fellow travellers. Yes, it’s been some time since my last post. I seem to have gotten off at an exit only to find myself back on the same highway. I’m stuck in a loop but can’t find the End statement. A little lame programmer humor for you. The story is that I had a freelance job here and there, nothing big. Did some dog sitting for a friend, which was a delight but kept me busy with two silly dogs in the house instead of just the one. Dealing with some back problems but that seems to have turned the corner now (acupuncture, who knew?). Also my ongoing struggle with depression, sigh. In other words, just been busy with everyday life in my cartoon household. But now I have a few new goals and projects and some more classes that I have completed. So on with the show.

If you remember, I took a class called Affiliate Marketing Beginner: Sell T-Shirts With TeeSpring. The instructor was kind enough to offer his Advanced class to those that finished his Beginner class. I completed that class and learned more in-depth information about using Facebook for marketing. Again, the courses were at Udemy.com. I haven’t followed up with selling a t-shirt in earnest although I do have some designs for sale at Spreadshirt. Without doing in real marketing as of yet because I don’t have the budget. However I did sell one shirt there just by being listed in their Marketplace. I’ll follow-up on the t-shirt endeavor later because I have a new project in the works. You can see the latest list of Certificates of Completion at the top left sidebar of the page.

My boyfriend is an outstanding guitarist and an equally fabulous teacher. He has come up with a series of guitar lessons aimed at children although, they are ideal for any beginner. We’ve decided to combine our talents and offer the lessons online. That means I have to really get it together and know what I’m doing to successfully make his site user-friendly so the visitor can easily purchase lessons and download the digital files.

Lo’ and behold I received another email from Udemy about Infinite Skills having a sale on their classes. I’ve been happy with their classes in the past so I checked it out. I’m now in the middle of a class called Using WordPress for ECommerce. It only cost me five dollars! It’s turned out to be one of the best classes I’ve taken. The instructor speaks English clearly, very knowledgeable of the subject and the material is extremely comprehensive. It covers all sorts of shopping carts and checkout software and plugins. I highly recommend this class to those interested in the subject. There is even a section on how to use WordPress to sell digital files, but I haven’t gotten there yet.  I’m so happy that I got that email from Udemy right when I needed it.

I don’t think I have to explain how a project like this could be a strain on our relationship. My boyfriend and I just need to be patient with each other and keep our sights on our goal. LOL. So I shall leave to go back to studying. I’ve got air in my tires, checked the oil and got a Big Gulp. See you in the fast lane!

 

But wait!…There’s more!

Hi again. This is going to be another short report. My tendinitis in my right hand and wrist is unbearable. However, I received a few interesting emails from some online learning services that may be time sensitive so I wanted to spread the word.

The first one is from Sitepoint. I’ve been going to their site for years for answers and great articles. Now they have a separate area called Learnable where all their educational information resides. Articles, tutorials, books and more. The good news is that they have reduced their subscription rate to $9! In my opinion, that is a fair rate. Here are the details. “Learnable memberships are normally $29/month. And with unlimited course enrollments, all SitePoint ebooks, 4,500+ tutorials, and quick answers from the experts, we think it’s an incredible value. Unlimited online access to all ebooks and courses, within your browser. Includes priority access to new releases, expert Q&A and 24/7 customer support.”

For you WordPress users, Woo Themes offers: NEW WooCommerce extensions: 25% off for 48 hours. Use coupon ‘july25‘ at checkout. I have not investigated this offer because I have to limit my time on the computer for a bit. But anyone out there looks it up and has an educated opinion of the deal. Let me know and I will pass on the word.

And as usual Creative Market has more astounding resources at reasonable prices and freebies. Whoever is in charged of that site has great taste and a definite vision. I certainly wish I had more disposable income! I love their hand drawn art and fonts. They will continue to be a site that I check every week.

Mighty Deals is also on my regular list of links of great resources. Here is the latest deal and it’s a good one. You’ve heard me recommend Infinite Skills classes before, well get this.  You’ll get unlimited access to the company’s learning library, chock full of more than 300 professional training courses. At a special price of only $15, that’s an 80% discount and a lot of subjects to choose from. This is a great way to take one of those expensive courses at a cheap price.

I’m 91% through with my PHP/MySQL course and I’m sidelined once again. Well it’s the ice pack for me and if I find any more special deals, I’ll pop in and let you all know.

Happy learning!

I will never take email for granted again

It’s true. My latest lessons in the PHP and MySQL course have been about how to set up email in PHP. Every little detail of the process is time consuming. I never suspected that it took this much code to create an email form on a website. I have learned that programming the email part is not so difficult as all the checks for errors and validation codes necessary to get clean information. It’s been very enlightening.

Just before starting this section, I had yet another Lab exercise. Most of it was straightforward, as usual. But, there were a few things that I just changed because it made more sense and was a better design choice for the Member Sign Up form. Hope that doesn’t come back to bite me in the next Lab. As I’ve mentioned before, this class I am taking is extremely comprehensive. I found it at Udemy and although it was priced out of my range, I only paid $19 because of a special that Infinite Skills was offering on all their class for a limited time.

For instance, the last few hours of this offer are counting down at Udemy.com/courses. Add A Spark To Your Summer – last day to get 65% off any* course with coupon code SPARK65

I’ve noticed that there has been some sort of special going on almost all the time so you may want to sign up there and you can choose the classes you would like to take and put them on your wishlist. Then, when Udemy has a special offer going on you can check you wishlist to see if one of your courses qualifies for the sale. Other e-learning sites also have promotional pricing on occasion so either keep checking those sites or get on their mailing list so you don’t spend more money than you have to. I have both the wishlist and the email reminders so I don’t miss a good thing.

According to recent emails many of the sites I like and purchase things from have new specials and offers for this month. So don’t forget to check your favorite sites to see what’s new for July. I’ve been seeing quite a few hand drawn fonts that I quite like. And some decent looking display fonts for t-shirts. If nothing else window shop and get your creative juices flowing.

I’m about to get even deeper into the intricacies of email so I better send my boyfriend out for more coffee. I’ve been out for almost two days. Okay, I’ll cowboy up and deal with it.

Fatal Error? Am I Gonna Die?

Hope everyone had a delightful and safe Fourth of July. Now that the traffic has died down I’m back. I’ve made it to Section 11, Lecture 104 which is a Lab exercise. Everything was going well, sort of, and I finally think I had the files coded as per directions. Then it happened. I tested my new links and got an Error on both. As usual the error is vague and not very helpful to a green horn like myself. I’ve been scouring the net looking for any explanations. I’ve found tons of people with the same error but all using different software and no two answers for a solution are the same. Now, I could just carry on with the lessons but as soon as the next Lab exercise comes around I’m still screwed. In this class, PHP and MySQL, the Lab exercises are where you take what you’ve learned in the previous chapter and apply it to the fake website. The website  is just a graphic until you add all the functionality to it with PHP code. Along with the databases you create and link. My instinct tells me the problem has something to do with the fact that I am running everything on localhost:8080. Or that I haven’t coded the $dsn properly because of that. I don’t know. The next thing I may try is to set up a virtual server instead. And no, I’ve never done that before either but I have instructions. At least it’s something to try. And I can’t believe those sentences came out of me. LOL.

This is a big problem when taking online classes. You are on your own. Some sites do have a place to post questions but good luck getting a timely answer. I’m left to scour the web for answers to any problems. Of the several places that I have taken classes, none have had a good Q and A setup. Most of the time it looks like no one is answering the questions and hasn’t been for some time. But, sometimes you can talk with other students and get some solutions, so it’s worth a try. This is a roadblock, but not enough of one to keep you from taking a class. I admit that I’ve learned a lot from even the free classes. Now if you are taking classes from Codecademy, there are lots of helpful answers out there on the web. Some even at youTube. So if you get stuck, be specific with your search and find someone who does know the answer.

I just found out about tutsplus.com. Looks like they have a wide variety of course types. Programming, photography, Design & Illustration, Web Design, App Design and so on. I believe I counted about 18 free courses in various subjects. The paid courses are very reasonably priced as well. However, I have not used their site yet so if anyone out there has, give us your review Tuts+.

I’m not giving up on my PHP/MySQL class. I shall overcome this problem. Back to the search engines for me. See you all soon.

Speedbumps On the Web Dev Journey

Once again, I’ve been a busy little bee and studying really hard for the current Lab test for Section 8 in my PHP and MySQL course. This time the Lab title sounded innocuous enough…”Reading A CSV File”. Okay, apparently the instructions were going to introduce something new as well as go over the material from Section 8. (I really hate that). I began to read the instructions and about three steps in my eyes started to glaze over. By the time I reached the end of the instructions, my brain imploded. This is what happens to a newbie learning a new language. Often the instructions have many of the same words repeated in different forms and each have totally different connotations. Once I regained my senses I had to read them several times. For the rest of you out there that are beginners like me, I will give you an idea of what you may come up against in you online education journey. The following were my instructions.

“The purpose of this lab is to demonstrate how to open and
read a CSV file. Copy the file “files_project_products.csv” into “htdocs/sweetscomplete/Model/products.csv”. Create a file htdocs/sweetscomplete/Model/Products.php…In the file set
up a class with the name “Products”. Define a public function “getProducts()”. Define a public function “getTitles()”.  Define a public variable $products…at the top of the file, inside the class: public $products. Define a “function __construct()”…Open the file “./Model/products.csv” using “fopen()”. Use a “while()” loop to read until “eof()”. Use “fgetcsv()” to read one line at a time
into an array $row. Using a foreach loop, convert the numeric array into an associative array which then can be added to
$this->products. Define “getProducts()” and “getTitles()”, “getProducts()” just needs to return $this->products. In this getTitles() define a “foreach()” loop using $this->products as $row. Populate an array $titles assigning $row[2]. Have the function return $titles. Modify htdocs/sweetscomplete
/products.php. At the top of the file add the statement: include “./Model/Products.php”. (btw-when I finally saw the answer they used “require” instead of include without explaining the difference). Delete the two arrays $titles and $products as they will be replaced. (Slight panic at this thought but I had backup). Create a “products” object: $products = new Products();  At the top of the file add a line “$titles = $products->getTiltles()”. Have “$maxProducts” be a count of $titles. Replace $products with “$products->getProducts()” in the call to function “displayProducts()”.”

Anyone still with me? If you passed out at sentence number 2,
I understand, I was just showing an example of what you might come against in some online courses. These directions were the longest I have had yet for a Lab exercise. Now, most of these instructions I could do but I had trouble understanding how to get the elements to work together. I could define the class and the functions even set up the loops but only partially. And the instructions were inconsistent with their punctuation and let me tell you that is a big deal to a beginner. The quotation marks and a comma that were left out could have given so much more clarity to the directions. I had to go back to my notes and really dig for examples of some of these things to find anything that looked familiar to the instructions. Once again, as I’ve experienced my whole life, it doesn’t matter how hard you prepare, the instructor is always going make certain that the test looks nothing like all the homework and exercises you’ve been studying. If you are an experienced programmer, you may be laughing right now but you were once a newbie too! And why are you reading this anyway? Nostalgia? Don’t judge me! Don’t get me wrong…I would love some advice or insight from experienced programmers regarding any computer language. The more helpful information, the better. Maybe your experiences  in learning and any advice on how to avoid any pitfalls you came upon during your educational journey. You have no idea just how your input could help us novices.

I finally made it through Section 8 and onward to 9…Managing A MySQL Database. Wooo! A little over halfway in the course and I made it to the database information. The introductory section seems easy enough but I better not get too big for my britches. Next time I’ll tell you about the latest course I signed up for but will have to wait a bit to get around to taking it. It sounds very web development all encompassing and I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. But the very special price was too good to pass up and I don’t feel like I’m wasting money if I’m learning.

My first and foremost concern at the moment is that I’m out of coffee. And I can’t even make espresso because my tendinitis is so painful I can’t work the machine. We are talking a desperate situation. I never did get a birthday present. Who could deny me one cup of overpriced coffee? See you all later and keep learning!