Iteration 3: Continuing to pull my hair

I really wanted my iteration 2 program to work and after hours and much frustration, I decided to give up. I started over and listened to some advice from Chris. He told me to use Google's API to create a site and it's a lot easier than what I was doing. I got the Google key and then continued on to create my site. My site switches blogs at the click of a button. The biggest issue I had was within my PHP file. Every time I tried to run the program, an alert box would come up saying "undefined". I have no clue what that means but that's what it said. No matter what i tried I got the same alert box or no results but no alert box. I am so happy that Chris helped me. If I have learned anything from these iterations it is that I HATE programming.

But when I was in John's office he told me about a cool site that I wished would have helped me more than it did. The site is pipes.yahoo.com. It pretty cool. It is supposed to help create mashups for the people that are not the best programmers but need to get things done. I found the site to be pretty interesting. It can filter contents and do a lot of other stuff.


One of the students from last semester blogged about it and she liked it. If I get more time I am going to try and create my own little mashup and then publish it so that can be searched and people can use it. It might even inspire someone else

Milestone 1

Today is the day of Milestone 1. Its a day where I worry did I do it correctly? Do I have enough information? I keep going back to the phrase that professor used in class that this milestone should be light. Light is not the correct word, but I can't remember the correct phrasing right now.

Did I run into problems? That is the "joy" of programming. You run into a problem and then you try and fix it. One thing that I tried to do this time was have an idea in my head exactly what I want to do. A lot of times i just jump into what I am doing and then I sink because I don't know what to do.

I finished chapter 1 and 2 before I started my individual application. I was reading a lot of the blogs and it seemed like everyone was trying to jump into their individual project. I agree because of deadlines you have have to make adjustments to your schedule. So, if you are running out of time, then you need to work on what is due. I just can't stress enough, that going through the application in the text book will help.

Problem that has come up with me doing a lot of testing of my individual project. I have gotten my application to work correctly and do exactly what I pictured in my head. The one thing I have noticed and having a hard time fixing is getting my application to work on internet explorer. It works just as planned on firefox. I know you need to have some different code for each browser. This is something I would like to fix hopefully before it is time to turn it in.

Final Blog

This will be my last blog post for IS 449. You can really appreciate blogging because it creates questions and answers. Professor Drake encouraged us to stay on top of our blogs and with the blog counter created by Matt Mager , it made it a fairly accurate way of keeping up with you blogs and also your comments.

The hardest part for me was creating a blog making sure it had relevance to it. Any one of us can type on for days about hobbies, interest, concerns or general issues, but to write a blog pertaining to class or IT related news can be difficult at times. I read several blogs that helped me and my group for our iteration. With this being a writing intensive course, blogs are a major factor of your grade. This shows the importance to not to get behind with blogging.

For all my classmates who are graduating , I wish you the best of luck and hopefully EMU has prepared you for the workforce. Professor Drake I wish you continued success as you guide the youth who earn for higher education. I hope that everyone have a blessed and safe Holiday.

Best Wishes,

Justin Gantt

Inidividual Project

I have been working on our individual project to add Google maps to my site. I really have had no problem adding the API to my page, but when I do I have problem with the rest of the page. This is my page before I add Google maps:



Basically how I have it set up is the description below the pictures comes up asynchronously when you click on a particular picture. I added information about each of the lakes in case someone may be interested in visiting one of them. I wanted to add the map to the left so that people could either see where the lake was or so they could get directions to each individual lake. The problem that I am running into is when I add the map I have to change the body tag to


in order to allow the page to fully load before the map is placed on the page. As you can see from my current webpage, now that I have the map on my page I can not get the information to come up. The only time that I can get it to come back up is if I change the tag back.

Is there anyone that could possibly guide me on what else I could try to get my asynchronous requests to work? I know that we are supposed to have a proxy pass through for the second iteration, but now that I started to do this it is bugging me why I can't figure it out. I am thinking that I may just need to step away for a moment in order to think about it, but I thought if anyone had anymore experience with Google maps they may know how to remedy the situation.