Last year, I wasn’t able to go to Stir Trek because it sold out well before I got home from work. This year, I didn’t catch the announcement and was still able to get a ticket. There were over 100 left.
Continue reading post "#1417"learning posts
Lynda JQuery Certificate
We had the day off for Veteran’s Day, so I’ve had some extra free time. I spent part of it doing some of the other Lynda tutorials. I worked on the SEO and JQuery ones. The SEO one is crazy long and it felt like I was making no progress. The JQuery one was about double the length of the Worpress one, but I finally finished it. Yeah! Here is my certificate for that one (Link no longer working).
I already knew most of the basics of JQuery, but the tutorial filled in many blanks for me. It went over all of the main parts and functions of JQuery fairly well.
It also introduced me to JQuery UI. That looks very neat for sure, but the full plugin, with the theme and what not, is something like 312kb. That’s crazy huge for a web site. Some (92kb) of that is images which would only load when needed, but the CSS for the theme is 28kb and the script itself is 192kb. Definitely a good thing that it is so easy to customize what parts you want. I generally try to keep my entire page loads, or at least the home page, under 100kb. That is becoming harder and harder as more images and functionality are expected, but it’s good to keep load times fast.
I took some notes on this one, a lot of notes. It’s really just as a reference for me. I forget the specifics of this stuff very easily and am always having to look it up, even sometimes for things I do frequently. I’m somewhat dependent on my notes. So, if I can figure out how, I will attach them as a text file. No point in adding them directly to this post, they will make it huge. But I’ll have to worry about that later: I have a usability event to go to (Link no longer working).
Lynda.com WordPress Certificate
Our class decided to use Lynda.com to learn more about WordPress and some other topics that will help us with our Stearns project. Our teacher has an account and was able to set up a limited time and course version for us at a reduced price. We are doing five courses with a little over a month to complete them in. I was worried this would be too short, but have been moving along pretty quick thus far.
Just recently, I completed the “Self-Hosting a WordPress Site” course, and they gave me this certificate for my trouble. This was the most important for the course, so that is why I did it first. I don’t know what weight these certificates would really have on a portfolio or resumé, but I think I will complete a few courses just for those.
So far, most of the videos I’ve watched have been about stuff I already know somewhat well, but there have been tidbits here and there to fill in some missing knowledge and a few videos about things I in fact know little or nothing about. Some of the videos seem a little long winded, repetitive, slow moving, or boring at times, but they do seem like they’d be good for complete beginners.
I’ll continue with the other four courses we have available. I’ll probably not be able to complete them all, but at least a couple more would be good. We have an SEO one which would be especially helpful, but is also rather long.