Street Art and Customising Tumblr Themes

Another couple of days of coding and I've been using Dash tutorials to build my own Tumblr blog theme. This was a pretty big project for me! Here are some of the things I learnt how to do...

• Make a classy header
• Use 'blocks' to build a Tumblr template
• Add Like and Reblog buttons to Tumblr posts
• Add pages to a blog site
• Assign each post its own permalink
• Make it all look pretty with CSS

I'm still playing with the tools I've learnt how to use, so my Tumblr site is not live yet. The image in picture above is a photo I took of some street art. Recently the lovely FORM Gallery organised street artists from around the world to come and liven up the city walls. They produced some amazing (and massive!) work - you're sure to see some if you wander around Perth. If you visit the Tea For Tu cafe on William Street in Northbridge, and go up the stairs until you (bizarrely) come out at the ground level cafe alfresco, sit yourself down in a comfy sofa and you'll see it. The sleeping one. 

Baklava & Code

Tonight's baklava

Oops, day 3 of blogjune and I'm doing a late night post… So today I had a much better day with my LibGuides 2 and my coding adventures. For the blog post today I'm going to a quick review of the teach-yourself coding site Codecademy which I have been using for a while now. 

This is a great tutorial site because it's free, it never gives you the answer (the hints are very helpful though), and it doesn't make unrealistic promises (code your own website in 24 hours!). It doesn't try to explain code theory, it just makes you start writing code straight away, and their console lets you see what you're creating as you do it. It does move through the content pretty quickly, so I've been taking notes as there is no way I can retain the amount of new stuff they get through. It's aimed at the beginner with no programming knowledge, which has been good for me. 

You can take a tutorial in various programming languages (HTML & CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, Python or Ruby), and there are lots of practice exercises to test your skills. There are badges and social sharing to motivate you (this really works for me) and the exercise come with a dose of friendly humour. I've almost finished the HTML and CSS course, and it's been fun. It's really still the beginning of the journey that I am determined to continue. The baklava was delicious.

Silliness, persistance and creativity

Today at work my colleagues and I are starting Week 2 of the 23 Mobile Things course, and the Thing is mobile photos. When I did the course the first time around I hadn't used my phone a lot for photos, but now I reckon I know what I'm talking about, having become an avid user of my phone camera for selfies, Instagram, and blogging and besides that, I really love photo editing apps and putting photos through various apps before publishing them. The silly glasses were added with the Photo Editor- app, and the filter and border were added in PicLab and Instagram. I'm also running the business Instagram page for my sister's lovely cafe in the Perth Hills, which made me realise how big Instagram is, and how it can be used to engage and attract customers. This week I read an interesting article on how university libraries can leverage the power of Instagram, although I don't really see a huge place for it in my library, apart from putting a slideshow gallery of promotional photos on our website. There are people getting really creative with their user communities with this type of social media, and it's so great to see.

Today I got frustrated at work trying to use the new LibGuides2 Beta platform. It seems to keep doing buggy things and I'm trying to work with code that is above my current level of understanding. Lucky there's no rush for the upgrade and I've got a bit of time on my hands now that all of the students are studying for their exams. I heard somewhere that coding requires persistance, and creativity. I'm thinking, sure, the persistance phase is going to go into years before the creative part can start! There will be more to come on my coding adventures...