Senior Project: Week 2

You Moved Again?

Yes and no. I am still using Blogger, but with AWS and Blogger together, I have implemented this blog into a subdomain of my new website!

You can now check out this blog at blog.nickscoolstuff.com and my regular website (which is currently under maintenance) at nickscoolstuff.com.

I am still currently in the process of getting certificates/HTTPS working but I hope to get it going soon. I have gotten an SSL certificate through Amazon and verified my domain, but Cloudfront which helps me distribute my website out to more locations/AWS itself doesn't seem to be converting the HTTP to HTTPS like I want it too. Another problem for another time I guess.

What is Your Project?

Alright, here we go with proper explanation.

For my senior project in the BASIS program at Olympic College, I am making a blog/portfolio website.

Why?

Because I want to be able to have a platform to express and market myself, while also having something fun to manage on my own. I have always wanted to have a website up on the web with an official domain name, and I think now is a great time to follow through.

What Do You Know About This?

With web development, past projects, and knowledge, I know a fair amount. I have been dabbling in web development related things for about 3 or 4 years now.

I have made a portfolio page similar to what I am going to be doing for my senior project for my cohort, in which we split up into 4 teams and the best was chosen to represent us. Unfortunately, at the moment, I do not remember where our site is located/credentials, but I may be able to share that in the near future. All I remember is that is was hosted through AWS.

Which brings me to my next point.

I am utilizing AWS for my website for hosting and sharing related things. I am still fairly new to Amazon's platform, but I have already gotten used to it fairly quickly.

What Will You Need to Learn to Accomplish This?

Honestly not too much. Really only one or two things.

Like mentioned earlier, AWS is still newer to me, but I already have it up and running and I am getting myself more familiar with it as time moves on.

Another thing I need to learn more a fair amount is the CSS platform called Foundation by Zurb. It is similar to Bootstrap though, and I have begun looking through their source projects and through things on https://codepen.io/ which has really cool user made examples of things related to CSS, HTML, and javascript.

Other than those things, the only other thing I might need to familiarize myself with more is remoting into servers/managing a web server through something like Linux. As I mentioned before in my last blog post, I tried messing around with Amazon's virtual machine EC2 instances and tried to get a web server running through Ubuntu Server as well as Amazon Linux Servers. I had some success, but nothing too major. 

I was able to remote in with a program called PuTTY and access the server from my home computer. I was also able to install some things like node.js and nginx and have them display when I went to an Amazon URL, but I still need to figure out how to customize the output to something I want to actually show instead of a default page.

How Does This Represent Your BASIS Learning and IT Skills?

As explained with my previous encounters while experimenting with things for this project, there are many skills being used with this project.

For one, there is planning. I have to plan out and think about time management as well as set my expectations for what I am to accomplish on my project. 

Second, there is research and analysis of topics, technologies, and compatibility within all of the things I am considering using for my project. Things like AWS, Linux/Web Servers, security, web-development practices, and so forth. Having knowledge is half the battle in some ways.

Thirdly, there is the actual use of skills and putting said skills together. With this project, I have to utilize my web development skills I have learned on my own, as well as with building websites and databases with teams in the BASIS program. In conjunction with this, I also have to keep track of domain information, statistics of the website, security of the website, and overall ease-of-use and access to the website. I also have to make sure that the website functions and looks the way that I want it to and keep it up to date over time. Finally, I have to keep track of third-party implementations, proper credit, and use of other skills such as remoting into my web servers and managing multiple accounts.

This project encompasses a lot of both basic and advanced things, into one big task of overall management and development of my knowledge and skills with IT.

I hope that through this blog, you can better understand my ideas, challenges, and expectations moving forward.

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. You can now view my blog at blog.nickscoolstuff.com as well as my website at nickscoolstuff.com. 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