The Debut

Well, it's finally here. My website has officially joined the internet! And while I'm incredibly happy and proud for having reached this milestone, I'm also feeling a mix of frustration and resignation at the amount of work that remains to be done here. One of the first things to jump out at me when I loaded my site for the first time on a different computer was how clunky and distorted the parallax feature appeared on my 'About Me' page. Considering that I used some absolute sizing criteria in my css code, I suppose I should have expected this to be a problem. Sometimes though, these things don't become noticeable until you really put them to the test. This, in addition to the struggles I encountered trying to find a suitable background container for the page, has made me consider doing away with the parallax all together. Instead, I might try to implement a carousel feature in hopes that it will make the page cleaner and more friendly to a wider array of screen resolutions. Additionally, I noticed almost immediately that several of my static images aren't being served properly, mainly in the project portfolio. I'll need to go back through my files and ensure that they're all in their proper places within my STATIC_ROOT and that my static files were collected properly when I initially pushed the project to Heroku. Finally, I just realized that I made the mistake of forgetting to add my settings.py file to my .gitignore before modifying my security settings. As a result, the secret key value was pushed to my GitHub. Thankfully, I was able to resolve this issue as soon as I realized it occurred, and am grateful that I was able to learn such an important security lesson from a relatively low-stakes mistake. To be entirely honest, I think I might take a break from this site before diving back in to make the final push to completion. I've devoted basically every ounce of my free time for the past three weeks trying to finish this project. On top of my full time job and online class, it's been a lot, and I think I would benefit tremendously from returning to this project in a week or two with fresh eyes. In the meantime, I'll just keep plugging away at my self-study in data structures and sharing my progress with this blog. While I might feel a bit disappointed and deflated now, I also need to recognize this accomplishment. I built this website from absolutely nothing (both code and knowledge-wise) in less than a month, and I deserve to be proud of myself for getting this far. -Joe