Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
Friday: 12:55-2:30
This week I finished the news section of the app. I made a menu out of the previous news page that would condense the school newspaper and school news into one menu that led to those individual pages, thus getting rid of one of the icons in the home menu. This was necessary due to my inability to draw a good icon in MS Paint that represented the school newspaper and because there would be far too many icons if each section of the app had its own on the home page. The school news section is now branched off from the overall news menu, which shows all of the titles of news stories. These titles are all buttons that lead to the full news story. I worked a lot on formatting the stories so that new paragraphs were recognized by the HTML, meaning I had to make a new <p> tag every time a "\n" escape sequence was found in the string of the story. I also worked on some formatting of all of the pages, like the background color and the appearance of tables used to display the different scraped information. Next, I will look at making a place for all of my colleague's code to go. The mapping algorithm will need its own icon and page, so I will make that next week as well as looking into alerts for school closings. Another member of Byte Club had previously made a short program that would allow the superintendent of the school to add entries to our database when a 2 hour delay, early dismissal, or closing occurred. So, I will work on gathering this information from the database, alerting the user, and adding a page to display all of those notifications.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Saturday, April 18, 2015
April 6-9
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started off by relaying the past week's events to my mentor. Then, the next step in the coding process is the news. I have to decide which news I want to scrape from the high school website: the upcoming events, or the actual news stories. I am leaning towards the actual news stories because I think that those might encompass some of both categories. Next is to scrape the information I want from the website. The issue is that every news story is its own link that leads to a popup instead of a regular webpage. So, not only do I have to scrape to find each link that leads to each story, but I have to deal with the fact that each link is in an odd format due to the fact that they are all popups. Another question I have to ask myself is whether or not I want to store the articles on our database. I don't want our database too become too full, so I'd rather not have to use it for unnecessary items, however if the articles are not stored on the database, then each device will need to scrape and store the information that they need to display. Another factor is that Python, the language I am using to scrape, does not mix well with text files and HTML, the language I'd use to display the articles, does not mix well with Python. Since the it is less efficient to figure out how to locally store the articles, I decided to suck it up and store them online.
A new problem arose after my first test: the problem with the page not loading before it is scraped has reappeared. Since I am trying to scrape from popups, the information I need is not present when I start scraping. So, I will either have to look for a new way to scrape these articles, figure out how to load the page before scraping it, or use the upcoming events for news instead. The upcoming events would not be hard to scrape, but I'm not sure that they would be as useful for users as the news articles would be.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-1:47
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I started off by relaying the past week's events to my mentor. Then, the next step in the coding process is the news. I have to decide which news I want to scrape from the high school website: the upcoming events, or the actual news stories. I am leaning towards the actual news stories because I think that those might encompass some of both categories. Next is to scrape the information I want from the website. The issue is that every news story is its own link that leads to a popup instead of a regular webpage. So, not only do I have to scrape to find each link that leads to each story, but I have to deal with the fact that each link is in an odd format due to the fact that they are all popups. Another question I have to ask myself is whether or not I want to store the articles on our database. I don't want our database too become too full, so I'd rather not have to use it for unnecessary items, however if the articles are not stored on the database, then each device will need to scrape and store the information that they need to display. Another factor is that Python, the language I am using to scrape, does not mix well with text files and HTML, the language I'd use to display the articles, does not mix well with Python. Since the it is less efficient to figure out how to locally store the articles, I decided to suck it up and store them online.
A new problem arose after my first test: the problem with the page not loading before it is scraped has reappeared. Since I am trying to scrape from popups, the information I need is not present when I start scraping. So, I will either have to look for a new way to scrape these articles, figure out how to load the page before scraping it, or use the upcoming events for news instead. The upcoming events would not be hard to scrape, but I'm not sure that they would be as useful for users as the news articles would be.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
March 30- April 1
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
This has been an exciting week! It was cut short because of a trip to RIT, but the time I did have was enough. I've finally finished the athletic calendar section of the app! It was so worthwhile to struggle through the ups and downs of that code because now that it is finished, I am very proud of what I've been able to accomplish. I had to change the scraping algorithm a little bit in the end because the data that I had been getting was not consistent for every event. I also had to put some code in to make sure that every block or every event was filled even if the database did not have the information I needed. I was able to do so by analyzing the times that the data I needed was not present. After that, I have finished! My colleague is still working on troubleshooting the school map and making turn by turn directions to accompany it. My next project will be to work on the news aspect of the app. However, I have decided to integrate the school newspaper into the news portion and differentiate between them in a menu that branches off from the news icon.
In other news, the last official Byte Club meeting of the year was this Wednesday. During the meeting, our president played a video about Unity 5 and spoke about how he has used previous versions o Unity to program and how Unity is a great way to start designing games. We will still have two other unofficial meetings this month, but I am very sad to see this school year pass me by so quickly. Byte Club has been a huge learning experience for me and I have made many friends that I'll be sad to leave. I will have to keep in touch and make sure it stays alive in the coming years because I think it is a great opportunity for high schoolers and I am so glad I joined.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
This has been an exciting week! It was cut short because of a trip to RIT, but the time I did have was enough. I've finally finished the athletic calendar section of the app! It was so worthwhile to struggle through the ups and downs of that code because now that it is finished, I am very proud of what I've been able to accomplish. I had to change the scraping algorithm a little bit in the end because the data that I had been getting was not consistent for every event. I also had to put some code in to make sure that every block or every event was filled even if the database did not have the information I needed. I was able to do so by analyzing the times that the data I needed was not present. After that, I have finished! My colleague is still working on troubleshooting the school map and making turn by turn directions to accompany it. My next project will be to work on the news aspect of the app. However, I have decided to integrate the school newspaper into the news portion and differentiate between them in a menu that branches off from the news icon.
In other news, the last official Byte Club meeting of the year was this Wednesday. During the meeting, our president played a video about Unity 5 and spoke about how he has used previous versions o Unity to program and how Unity is a great way to start designing games. We will still have two other unofficial meetings this month, but I am very sad to see this school year pass me by so quickly. Byte Club has been a huge learning experience for me and I have made many friends that I'll be sad to leave. I will have to keep in touch and make sure it stays alive in the coming years because I think it is a great opportunity for high schoolers and I am so glad I joined.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
March 23-26
Monday: 12:55-2:30
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I continued to make the front end for the athletic calendar in the app. I decided to use a month view for the calendar, and create buttons in each day that had events in it so that when the button was clicked, all of the events in that day and their pertinent information are shown. So, first I worked on the buttons, creating them, and formatting them. Surprisingly, it was more difficult than I had initially imagined to get the buttons to be displayed as an image. After that, the other difficulty I faced was that in order to have the events for the particular day shown, I would have to open a new window to show those events. There were other paths I could have gone down to get the effect I wanted, but I figured that opening a new window would be the most straight forward. So, to do this, I would have to pass information from one html file to another, wither by text file or some other means, or get the information from the database in both files. In order to make the app the most efficient, I wanted to pass the information. My options were further cut down when I found out that writing to files in Javascript is impossible.
Additionally, a new member of Byte Club has started making an easter egg for the app that we are going to call "flappy falcon", which is a version of flappy bird that has our school's mascot as the main character. In other areas of the app building process, the pathfinder is almost completed, but testing is still going on to correct errors in specific cases. After those cases are found and eliminated, my colleague will begin to work on step by step directions between two classrooms. After that project and the athletic calendar are finished, we will work on receiving data from the database that is relevant to students like 2 hour delays and cancellations of school. Another Byte Club member has made a simple program that will upload data to the database regarding this information that we will give to the staff member who calls such occurrences into the news in the morning so that the information will be readily available when needed.
Tuesday: 12:55-2:30
Wednesday: 12:25-2:30
Thursday: 12:55-2:30
This week, I continued to make the front end for the athletic calendar in the app. I decided to use a month view for the calendar, and create buttons in each day that had events in it so that when the button was clicked, all of the events in that day and their pertinent information are shown. So, first I worked on the buttons, creating them, and formatting them. Surprisingly, it was more difficult than I had initially imagined to get the buttons to be displayed as an image. After that, the other difficulty I faced was that in order to have the events for the particular day shown, I would have to open a new window to show those events. There were other paths I could have gone down to get the effect I wanted, but I figured that opening a new window would be the most straight forward. So, to do this, I would have to pass information from one html file to another, wither by text file or some other means, or get the information from the database in both files. In order to make the app the most efficient, I wanted to pass the information. My options were further cut down when I found out that writing to files in Javascript is impossible.
Additionally, a new member of Byte Club has started making an easter egg for the app that we are going to call "flappy falcon", which is a version of flappy bird that has our school's mascot as the main character. In other areas of the app building process, the pathfinder is almost completed, but testing is still going on to correct errors in specific cases. After those cases are found and eliminated, my colleague will begin to work on step by step directions between two classrooms. After that project and the athletic calendar are finished, we will work on receiving data from the database that is relevant to students like 2 hour delays and cancellations of school. Another Byte Club member has made a simple program that will upload data to the database regarding this information that we will give to the staff member who calls such occurrences into the news in the morning so that the information will be readily available when needed.
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