NASA A Picture Of The Day

I did a whole bunch of changes to how it looks. I changed the fonts, the background, the size of the images, and made the buttons bigger and underneath the explanation. It wasn’t hard per se, just took a lot of fidgeting with.

So now I made it to where the image is on the left side of the screen and the text is next to the image on the right. I still need to fix sizing though. I’ll probably make it to where all images are the same size and the text also is the same or changes based on the size of the description to fit the frame. I wonder if there’s a way to automatically adjust everything so that all components fit onto the users specific screen size.

I also ran into this issue where because NASA uses UTC, even though it’s June 7th for me in ETC it was trying to load an image for June 8th which does not exist. So I had to add an extra thing to my error handling where if I receive a 404 error because I couldn’t fetch the image, it’ll go back to the previous days image.

I got buttons to switch between the days. This was definitely the hardest thing I’ve done before because the Date stuff in JS was very confusing. I ended up creating two separate functions to go forward or backwards one day. It’s still slow and clunky and doesn’t look that good but I think this is a good point to stop and start working on visuals.

I’ve gotten the title, date, picture, and description to all appear on the local host website. It wasn’t hard, just basic HTML but its progress nonetheless. Next up I need to make a way for the user to move forward and backward through the days so they can see more than one image. Right now you have to zoom out to 75% to actually see everything so once I get most of my features implemented, I’ll make it look better. I’m having a lot of fun!

I’ve started working on the first parts of the code. JavaScript and React is pretty new to me (I do know Java) so I’m really just googling a lot and I watched “
How to FETCH data from an API using JavaScript ↩️” by Bro Code. I’m trying not to use AI and I’ve been successful so far but idk how long that’ll last.