Individual Project 3

As the due date for our individual projects nears, I began to work on getting a second rss feed into my last project. The hardest part of the individual project so far has been finding rss feeds for my chosen topic of travel. The first one I find was Kayak and they actually have several different feeds that can be used. Finding the second one was a lot harder. I tried Yahoo travel, Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia. I finally found an rss feed for Expedia and decided to add that one.

So the next part was to figure out how to add the second feed to my current project. I looked back over the class blog and saw the examples that were put up and this really helped. So I wrote the code based on this example, loaded it on people.emich and hit the button. I was happy that it worked until I saw that only the second feed was coming up. This surprised me a little; I would have expected the first one and not the second one to work.

I spent some time playing with the code and still could not get it to function right. I went through every line of code and could not see what the problem was. I finally asked one of my group mates for help. They were able to catch the mistake that I had kept missing and my feed now works with both Kayak and Expedia. The one thing I have learned about writing code whether it be C#, JavaScript or any other computer language is that there is very little room and any type error and the programmer must be a very diligent person and keep checking each line. If one variable is wrong, the whole application will not work.

Individual Iteration 2

Since Iteration 2 was due yesterday, I figured I'd write about my own frustrations and a few things that are going on with our group project. I am very sad that I could not get my program to work. Usually I try and try and try and then something happens but this time I had no luck. I attempted to display my blogs from my IS279 class in which we have to write at least 5 blogs a week. I thought it would be cool to show my blogs that I have written for that class. It seemed like a piece of cake when I was thinking about it but it turned out to be more complicated than expected.



I did all the usual stuff look over John's code and then turn it into my own but that did not work. Here is what it looks like:

I went to see John Wednesday morning and he helped me out a lot but then I kept getting the "Document" is null or not an object error for this part if my code:

function formatFeed(xml){

var html = "";

var thisEntry = xml.documentElement.getElementsByTagName("entry");

At this point, I changed a few things and the error messages stopped but nothing happened. I was hoping that the server just wasn't updating in a timely manner but that's not the case because I tried to run my program today and no luck. So I didn't get it to work.

As for the group project goes, my group had to change which sites we wanted to use because two of the sites didn't have APIs. So we made a quick decision and we're planning on using two different sites now.