Week 5 Hitting the APIs

I spend a lot of time this week familiarizing myself with AJAX and API requests. I followed a few online tutorials (I found the one from w3schools http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp) which were very helpful in deepening my understanding of how the client side interacts with the server side. The Mozilla developers network was also a good source for trouble shooting XMLHttpRequests.

After doing all this reading I jumped into Notepad++ and made myself up a few html pages with simple buttons that I could click that would run functions to send out XMLHttpRequest's the to various APIs we were going to use for our group project.

The first images below are playing around making calls to the MementoAPI which is an easy way to access the archived website links available on the Wayback Time Machine as Trove does now allow access to their website zone.

API call to Memento Wayback Time Machine

Response from API call to Memento

At the moment the results are just coming back as text, but I did this exercise more as a proof of concept to make sure it would work and that we can grab the url links. Moving on from this I think got the w3schools validator API up and running with another simple test.

API call to w3schools validator

Response from call to w3schools

This weeks lecture and the workshop content helped to reinforce what I had already learned myself but it was good learning how to access the back end of our website in the workshop session. Coming from a non-technical backgrounds it was good learning about file transfer protocols and how to actually get content up and onto a web server.

Also managed to set up a simple mySQL database with a single table. We should be able to use this in the group to manage Usernames and Passwords so that we can have a login system, and even save users progress. Our group is also using Github for this project so learning how to use both it and FileZilla will be a great experience.

Next week my goal is to set up a login system which can actually store usernames and passwords using PHP. I will begin by looking at the PHP beginners links posted on the deco1800 resources page and then look for online tutorials from there.

Our team has also agreed to have the proposal document written and finished by this weekend so I will spend some of next week editing that and getting ready for the pitch and final submission. Overall I am pretty happy with this weeks progress and hopefully we can start getting into some low fidelity prototypes late next week so that we can think about testing.

Teamwork Module (Week 3)

We would like you to reflect on how you found this teamwork module useful in relation to your team expectations

This module was very similar to the online training programs at my workplace. Working in sales a lot of the content around communication and active listening was more of a revision than any new learning. However, it is always good to have a refresher and to keep all these aspects in mind when jumping into a group situations.

Another take away that I took from the module was the importance of Team roles and setting down expectations when the group forms. I feel that this has been an issue in previous group projects where not all team members had similar expectations which caused conflicts later into the process.

Major Concerns

After our first team meeting I do not really have any major concerns. This is the first time I have worked in a group where people have actually chosen a topic because they were interested in it, rather than being assigned randomly or forming groups with their friends.

I am excited to see how this works out as everyone should have a vested interest in the concept. That being said I am concerned that because the design idea our team was formed around was based on my pitch, that the team would consider me the 'owner'. Making them less likely to contribute ideas or challenge my position on design ideas because I might be offended. However, I am not significantly attached to my topic and am more interested in how others could help me to evolve the concept rather than pursue it alone.

I am also somewhat concerned about the expectations, while I am eager to learn new technologies and expand my understanding. I feel that my concept was definitely ambitious for my current level of skill. But with the help of the team, tutors and online resources I am sure it will be achievable.

How you could avoid them?

Communicate, communicate, communicate. That was one of the biggest takeaways from the training module and something that i need to improve on when working within teams. I feel that this would be the best way to ensure others provide feedback on the concept and take ownership of it themselves.

Effective team meetings are something that I want to try and implement more and more. I feel like these are an excellent way to manage team member expectations, providing everyone with a single purpose and then outcomes that they need to produce.

How you think you can be a good team member?

Contribute to team discussions and provide energy in all aspects of group work. Complete assigned tasks to a high standard and help others with their tasks when asked too. Encourage inputs from all members.

Overall just be a good person ^.^ 

Trovin

Crawling through Trove for some more inspiration and ideas. I started off looking in the maps section, to see if there was anything I found particularly interesting. I wanted to get away from a historical / educational theme and figured that maps of some areas from older time periods could still be useful for tourism.

Maybe hidden on old maps of Brisbane or Queensland there were some hidden gems that people had forgotten about or did not know about at all. After looking at the Official guide book to the capital of queensland it seemed that not a lot had really changed, maybe just the names of things were different. But there were still day trips and getaways to places. With this style of data perhaps a retro tourism website could be created?

Alternatively my search through trove also took me to looking at tourism posters for Queensland.

While these posters themselves might not be the most appropriate they appear to be the right shape for playing cards. Which got me thinking that some sort of memory game or even a pairs game might be a good way to show some of the more interesting art works or posters that are on trove.

Week 2 Workshop - Digging through the Trove

This weeks workshop was another chance to explore trove and yet another chance to get astounded and confounded by its enormous scope. I thought trove was already scary but looking through the API and doing some queries things were made a little clearer on how I could retrieve the information I wanted.

However, with each question answered more popped up in the form of definitions and concepts that I was unfamiliar with. Sure I had heard of an API and XML and JSON objects, but what they actually were and how they worked mostly foreign to me still. So after sifting through trove for a little while I jumped onto the w3schools website to read up about XML and JSON to get a better idea of what was actually happening when I made a query. I figured out an API was an application programming interface, but it could not really nail down what exactly that means despite some searching. Hopefully we will go a little bit more into the nitty gritty next week.

While I could use the query systems on the DECO1800 cloud sever, the background of why I had to use that and what is was actually doing is still fuzzy. Perhaps that is enough and will get me through the next few weeks, although on a personal level I love knowing how things work so I might look into it more.

Either way its time to start churning out some actual ideas on how to make Trove data more useful and interesting ways to display the data in a web based application.

Studio Session

Exploring Trove

First impression of Trove is that it is terrifying and monstrous. There is just so much information and so much data it feels super easy to get lost. I spent the beginning of the studio session and the group brainstorming trying to figure out how the system worked and what kind of information that could be found there.

The help section was exceptionally useful, however the best find was the application gallery and the experiments that other people had created using trove. A quick look at the eyes on the past project gave a great insight into the kind of things could be done using trove.

These are resources which I will need to look into further to help with idea generation and exploring the problem space once the brief has been released.

The results of our group brainstorming are shown below.

Results from group brainstorming

Our teams discussions revolved quite heavily around naval history and the early historical period associated with seafaring and exploration. Ideas for point and click adventure games as well as choose your own adventure tales were plenty.

While I know a little about Australian history it would be interesting to delve deeper into one specific area or time period to consider for the project. 

Course Expectations (Week 1)

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be doing a lot of work this semester and hopefully having a lot of fun.

I will admit that before going to the first lecture and even after i was not 100% on what I should be expecting from this course. However, after doing a little bit of looking around (which I probably should have already done) I have a better idea of what to expect.

After a good look at the course profile and noticing that introduction to web and introduction was listed as a Pre-Requisites and introduction to software engineering being a companion course. From this is expect that there will be MORE coding in this course which should be fun.

From looking at the workshop details posted on blackboard I can now safely expect that we will be doing some image manipulation in Photoshop and design work in Illustrator. Then a quick look at the last years Google+ community I am expecting group work and interaction with other groups in the course.

I want to learn different software packages and programming languages to improve my overall skills an capabilities. Ultimately I just want to learn and absorb as much as I can from not only this course but my team members and class members.

I am worried about juggling all my courses which all seem to have big design builds this semester.

I hope that I can manage my courses and time more effectively this semester.