I’m learning some more web design techniques to integrate into my website and I have noticed that I have a passion for web design!

  • I’m going to the Big Data meetup at the Madison Central Public Library on Mifflin Street. There are 47 others who are going as well. They will be discussing how Apache Drill can be used to build queries for Hadoop databases. Those are the fancy new databases that can deal with loosely-structured data that is ever-changing and needs to be analyzed quickly. The data is also usually large. Apparently you can use SQL to access Hadoop data? That would be nice since everybody knows SQL and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon!

  • I came across the codepen.io website to test your JS/CSS/HTML code isntantly. I’ve heard of plenty of other websites that do the same thing (e.g. jsfiddler) but this one seems to be way more popular at the moment.

  • I’ve been studying how to display content using CSS table styling. You can easily make a grid layout that behaves a bit like a table using <div> tags with display: table-cell. The container must use display: table. http://www.senktec.com/2014/01/using-css-display-table-cell-for-columns/

  • I realized why my jQuery table plugin wasn’t working on my DefiantRock music site. You have to put the script at the bottom of the page or within a DOM ready statement. http://css-tricks.com/absolutely-position-element-within-a-table-cell/

  • Cards: I read an interesting article about the future of the web using “cards.” Twitter is using them right now. The basic idea is that you can interact with an external API/website using a small block that looks like a card. You can carry out functions from an external site without ever leaving the page you are on. Like a window to the external page. http://blog.intercom.io/the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them/

  • I’m tweaking the playlist function on my website. I’m making it so anyone can add songs to public playlists, so I have to add a userid field to the ‘playlist song’ table to keep track of who added a song to the playlist.

Alright, need to work on my website!