Senior Project: Week 1

Getting Started / Expectations

So, just to get this out of the way...

My original blog site is located at http://nickscoolstuff.co.nf/research-project-ai/

Which brings me to why we are here.

Why Did You Move?

If you checked out my site linked above, you may have thought "This is nice (or just functional). Why are you moving to something like Blogger?

Well for starters, I was having issues with my hosting service, Wordpress files, the database, and permissions.

To simplify and keep things short: My main account that I used for posting everything on the site messed up and I can't seem to fix it without jumping through hoops and pulling my hair out. I managed to add another admin account to use and keep the site up and running until the near future.

My Senior Project

As some of you may know, I am a student at Olympic College in Bremerton. It is a smaller, yet respected community college. I have been going there since high school through running start and I am now on my last quarter for my Bachelor's program which seems crazy to me.

The Bachelor's in question is the Bachelor's of Applied Science in Information Systems (BASIS). 

For my last quarter I will be doing a senior project which will show off my skills and applied knowledge over the past 1 to 2 years in the program. With this in mind, I wanted to improve something that I was familiar with but had little experience doing by myself rather than in a group.

For My Senior Project I Plan to Re-Create a Portfolio / Blog Site

This will allow me to gain experience of making a website all by myself and give me something useful in the end that is much more straightforward to manage since it will be created by me, rather than having to deal with plugins and such from something like my Wordpress site.

Don't get me wrong, I like Wordpress a lot and find it fun and simple to make flashy websites.

But I want to make a website completely from scratch, implement some third party solutions, and host it online with a paid domain. Something I have always wanted to do some day.

Expectations For This Final Quarter

I honestly expect a lot of work to be done in chunks of time. While I want to work on things linearly, I know that procrastination or other things will happen. With this project though I will get very involved and will most likely get a lot done in the time I do work on it, so there will still be major progress overall. 

The same goes with researching, design, and planning. While most of it I want to do upfront, I know that things are always subject to change, especially with a website of this nature. 

Near Future Plans

At the moment, I plan on looking into various designs and third party tools to help me with my website creation. I already have a few in mind, but the main things I need to consider are as follows:

Wrappers such as Bootstrap, commenting system such as Disqus or my own local comment system, login system such as Google or a self-made database system, database structure for storing files and blog posts if need be, a system for storing and showing my files which will preferably be linkable things like Google Docs.

Whew. Seems like a lot, but I expected as much. On top of all of this, I need to come up with even just a basic layout/design to get things started. I might look into things like Adobe XD or Layoutit for basic template ideas. I also might consider not using a wrapper like Bootstrap and go all-in with something like CSS Flex Grid since you can do a lot of cool and similar things with it.

Thanks!

Thanks for checking out my first blog on Blogger and the first to my Senior Project series. Stick around to follow up on how my website and overall research and development progress is going along. Also don't forget to check out my old website at http://nickscoolstuff.co.nf for more stuff about me until I make the switch to my new site.

Thanks! - Nick Messenger