A Frustrating Morning

More so than perhaps any other practice, programming can take you to the highest highs of satisfaction and the lowest lows of frustration. My work on this website earlier this morning was a prime example of this duality.

I started off by finishing the basic functionality of the 'blog' app. Now, visitors will be able to visit the neatly laid out index page and click on a snippet of any past entry to view the post in full. When combined with my project portfolio, this marked the skeleton completion of my second app on this website. Feeling encouraged and filled with pride, I then tried to add some customized features to the front end of my website. How hard could it be? I was only planning on altering some color schemes and perhaps adding some pictures.

But as it turned out, this seemingly simple objective quickly became a morass of frustration and wheel-spinning. More specifically, I found myself unable to change the color of the navbar in my base.html template. Because I linked my project to Bootstrap using a CDN, I tried to overwrite the default styling by creating my own css file. But as I attempted to apply custom colors to the various classes in my navbar, I found that they were not reflected in my website. Additionally, feedback from my terminal indicated that my custom css file could not be found. Considering that I placed this file in the same directory as my base.html template, this was especially frustrating to me, and was a problem that I was not able to immediately resolve.

After about an hour, I decided to cut my losses, revert my changes, and try again later. As a novice in the Bootstrap framework, there are still a lot of features that I have yet to learn about. And as I continue to move this site towards deployment, I need to remain patient with myself and not bite off more than I can chew. For the time being, I plan to return my focus to the back end of my website, and ensure that it has all the functionality I want before diving back into front end customization.

My mantra for the rest of the day will be: 'One thing at a time!'

-Joe