Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Long Time No See

Wow, I haven't visited this in a while. I used to use LiveJournal a lot, and I only used this during my cosmos times. Well, I decided to document my thoughts on my summer projects. Here are some things I'd like to work on this summer. Web development Html, Css, Javascript, and servers (if I have time/resources)
Immediate goal: I'm going to start developing for something for Bread of Life. It's going to be at http://bread.bol.ucla.edu. Exciting! I thought about using frames, but I decided to use tables and css instead. Today I worked on getting the home page done. It's pretty much completed. The rest should go faster, now that I've learned something about CSS. Also, some content will be the same/similar throughout all pages, so I can copy and paste that. Hopefully it'll turn out nice, I'm putting this as my priority right now.
Short-term goal: So for html, I've been practicing on my own website from Bruin Online. I'm going to try putting up some old programs I have, and... yeah I'm not quite sure what else I'll put here yet =) but it's fun.
Short-term goal: I also want to try some more interactive stuff. I used some CGI scripts from Bruin Online to do some basic forms, but the cgi scripts are annoying. The Bruin Online one asks you to perform some basic math so they know you're not spamming. I'm going to try making some kind of search engine. Full-scale web is too ambitious for right now. I'm going to try to make a topical/thematic one on a finite source like a book(s). Currently using the Bible because it's division into books, chapters, and verse give me an idea for rankings. Perhaps this will expand later.
Medium-range goal- javascript 2-player turn-based game. Just some client-side processing. Some pokemon-style game, but maybe without the pokemon. I'm thinking of a battle with a finite moveset, and some moves will be more effective against a particular type of move than others. This will be fleshed out later.
Long-term goal- Learn how to interface with Google or Yahoo image search. Since image search just looks for images next to the text you enter in the query, I want to learn how to refine those search results based on relevant image content. That, needless to say, is quite an ambitious task...
Long-term goal- Learn AJAX, php, asp, mySQL, or another server-side language. And at the same time, I'll need to learn how to set up a server. Hopefully I'll have the resources to do that. I don't have a specific application in mind yet, but I'm positive that whatever search engine I have will be much better if it's server-side, instead of on the client. Right now you pretty much have to download the entire database. So the search engine is one possibility. Others will come I'm sure.