My Iteration 1

So I decided to talk a little bit about iteration 1 for the individual project. Suffice to say that I ran into quite a few challenges but the experience gave me a much better understanding of what AJAX is capable of. My theme is a ski conditions web site that will allow you to click on a ski resort icon, located on the left hand side and display information about the resort.

On the first iteration I wanted to accomplish getting the trail map of the resort to load in a separate div tag along with the description of the resort. For the most part this is my first experience with extensive css so it was a struggle to try and understand what i needed to do in order to accomplish my goal. I followed chapter one very closely as it was very similar to me objectives. Load a page and load some image files to speed up the process of clicking on them. I also wanted to have a description box that listed the details for the resort. While it took me nearly 10 hours to get it all working the site is going as planned.

For the second part I would like to integrate google maps api as well as a weather api that when a resort icon is clicked it displays the trail map, the map of the mountains location, as well as the current weather conditions. While I'm confident that I will be able to accomplish this I'm still very lost as to how these api's are integrated into the site. My hope is that as we progress through the class I will have a better understanding of the process. The one thing that I will say is that after spending weeks reading about AJAX without a whole lot of success understanding how it worked. I feel like rolling up my sleeves and writing the code was the best way for me to understand the concepts as well as the help of Google, when it came to searching things I wanted to accomplish. While i looked through many javascript sites like W3Schools.com, I had much better luck doing google searches for things like "loading images on startup javascript". When I did stuff like that I found excellent examples of how others had coded similar objectives.