The Herptionary: a Guide to all things Herps

Herptionary Devlog 006: I give up, I have something functional kinda, lets ship that

So… I disappeared for a bit… I left town for like a month for college visits and supporting a family member in travel. Looking at my API troubles with a fresh set of eyes really did not help, but y’know what? I tried. I failed. But the website does function and I did manage to get it to send requests to a free dictionary API and actually return something, so I am okay with putting this temporarily on the backburner while I learn more about website building and shipping it for hopefully enough stardust to not show my name with every visit.

Changes:

• Added python file that will hopefully be the basis of my custom API in the future
• Added “progress” warnings to all pages left unfinished this ship; will add more text and write the articles soon hopefully
• Added logo to header

“how did you spend two hours on this?” I spent most of that struggling to get an API working, installing extensions, testing the site, and reloading VScode so many times I think i have the button pattern burned into my brain. Someday I will succeed at this. That day is not today.

WE HAVE A LOGO!!!!

Not much else to note; been working on trying to get a basic API up and running and failing miserably, which is what the time is. I did try to track the two hours I spent working on this logo but lapse broke - twice - so that’s gone out the window. But. Frog book :)

(To the one dude in the slack who said the snake was cooler: yes, but it looks TERRIBLE vectored lol)

Devlog 4: WE’RE ON THE WEB!!!

The Herptionary is officially online! And formatted properly!

What I did:

• Redid my file organizaton so Cloudflare would recognize it as an actual site

• Put it on Cloudflare

• Fixed a bunch of issues, including the footer being stuck to the top of the screen on the dictionary and the header not being a header.

What’s next:

• Build an API for all the herp terms I want to add

• Vector my logo (to be revealed next devlog!)

• Write the Reptiles landing page

Herptionary Devlog 3: simplified, but at what cost

So, instead of building 26 letter-based pages and crying over file organization, I bit the bullet and found a tutorial on how to make the site access an API and retrieve a definition from somewhere else (thank you codingartistweb.com).

The formatting is still off, but now that I am actually using a CSS stylesheet I should only have to do this once and then all my pages should be formatted properly.

I am hoping that building an API from scratch does not require me to work with a fourth coding language, especially since I will have to eventually build three of them (one for the dictionary itself, and one each for reptile and amphibian searches), but for testing purposes I am currently using a free online dictionary API thing that came with the tutorial. It doesn’t have all the terms I am planning on including, so I can’t keep it that and skip building an API, but it is funny to search swear words while I am making sure that I didn’t break it while reformatting my site.

I love my tadpole stage website :)

Herptionary Devlog 2

So I had to redo my file organization TWICE to get it to work and make sense but I HAVE PAGE NAVIGATION WORKING!!!

What I Did:

• Added several home and landing pages, including the Dictionary Home Page and an About Us page
• Linked (and re-linked) images to the site for proper display of visual data
• Set up page navigation, including a functioning link in the header (to be replaced with an image)
• Cried over file organization
• BUTTONS!!! I HAVE BUTTONS AND THEY WORK!!!

Next Steps:

• Build the main Dictionary pages (…oh. 26 letter pages ALONE. I may have bitten off more than I can chew guys)
• Figure out how to make a wiki-esque edit system to make expanding the site to multiple people a LOT easier when I need help actually filling in the dictionary
• Ask if I can count graphic design time as hours spent on this project before I learn a new vector design system
• Develop a wiki-esque source system so I don’t have to link every single ^# credit by hand

Herptionary Devlog 1

So I happen to be an aspiring herpetologist (amphibian and reptile scientist). Much to my annoyance, some guy in the 1200s decided my favorite creatures in the world were “monsterous” and grouped them together, and now everyone is afraid of them. So, I’m gonna put my other interest to work and fix that!

What I did:

• Set up the workspace, hackatime, etc. for my first true coding project
• Made my first few (VERY basic) pages in HTML.
• Made bug/error/incorrect info reporting google form for when I do get this on the web.

Next Steps:

• Figure out how to link pages
• Find hosting stuff
• Graphic Design?

(Screenshot attached: a quick build of my homepage)