the story so far... II

I've not spent as much time as I would have liked on the 'lunch project' this week.  The idea is to create an app to help me with Christmas lunch.  To say I'm cutting it fine is well... true.

What I've done

• I've decided to make an app to aid in the cooking of Christmas dinner
• I've created wireframes
• I've started to build the app using meteor
• I've had some fun with DNS which has now been fixed.
• I've added adsense to this blog

Where I am

• You can now see steps and add new ones to the app
• I've fixed the dns for ben.best (so that it ends up here you may need to clear some caches if you've already tried this)
• I've also got to the point where the times add up.

What I'm hoping to do

• By Thursday (25-12-2014)
• Get something working that I can use on Christmas day.  The next big step is sorting out dependancies.
• On Wednesday (24-12-2014)
• Write a how to post similar to the how to set up a mailing list one
• On Friday (26-12-2014)
• Write "friday's interesting things III" based on "friday's interesting things I" or "friday's interesting things II"
• On next Monday (29-12-2014)
• Write another "story so far post" admitting what I didn't get done from the above list.

friday's interesting things II

Taking a break from building an app here's this weeks interesting things that grabbed my attention this week.  Though I'm sharing them here, I'm really using these lists as a sort of bookmark list.

Learn Meteor in 6 weeks

This is interesting, I've done quite a few of the tasks, though following the disaster last night, I might need to re-visit some of the earlier steps.  I know that I don't have 4 solid hours a day to work on this sort of project (and that would put me a long way after Christmas) however it does look like a fun list.

http://meteorpedia.com/read/Tutorials

A world without microbes

A friend of mine from 6th form college (which was a very long time ago) has written an article about what the world would be without microbes.  Even though my biology lessons finished with my GCSE's at 16 I found this accessible and really interesting.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002020

Dominus

Dominus is a nice (free) web based game built with meteor.  I've just started playing and it looks really interesting.  Also the author has some interesting things to say about Meteor's check function

http://dominusgame.net/

Hex colour clock

This has been all over the web this week, partially as it's such a simple and well executed idea. I really love this.

http://whatcolourisit.scn9a.org/

an evening of sorting out a meal (getting collections in meteor wrong)

Not the best of evenings, I've spent the last few hours trying to add the meal part and getting dates just wrong.

It's one of those things that I'll try and sort out tomorrow.  The main issues were to do with adding the new parent part to the collection and then trying to sort out the date part.  All this is in preparation for sorting out dependancies.  I'll get there and I'm feeling quite pleased that this is the first evening that's gone badly, but I'm going to close the laptop and go to bed.

I've started on the interesting Friday things part 2 but I'll get it sorted tomorrow.

marking things as done (and not doing things!)

Well it was an interrupted couple of hours but it was a couple of hours...
I have added the ability to mark steps as done (or to undo said marking).  I've also added some "beautification" and started to get rid of some of the css that had been given with one of the tutorials.

I'm quite pleased with where I've got to, it's going to lead nicely into tomorrow's playing with dependencies (or at least hopefully tomorrow).  If you want to see the new functionality it is (as ever) at lunch.ben.best you'll need to be logged in to mark things as done / undo them.  There are a few bits that I'm not really that happy with:

• The layout doesn't quite feel right, mostly the second part that will contain the details of the dependencies.
• The button labels: "done" and "undo", better suggestions are more than welcome
• Logged in / not logged in bits not quite working as I would have expected.
• I thought I'd added a deny rule that I would have needed to change to stop me doing exactly what I've done.

Of the these it's the last one that concerns me most, however I need to do quite a bit of playing with the security and ownership bits so I'm sure it'll all come out in the wash.  Overall I'm quite pleased with the progress I've made over the last couple of nights.

In other news I now know what I'm cooking meat-wise for Christmas lunch - a 2 kg turkey crown and a piece of topside.  The topside is being provided by my parents in law so I'll not know exactly the weight of that until they arrive on Friday.
For posterity here's a screen show of the current look:

To the things not done, I made a deliberate decision to not write a "so you want to..." post tonight, I was in the mood for keeping going with the lunch project.

seconds, minutes and hours

I've managed to spend a couple of hours playing with my app to help me cook Christmas lunch...
I've now enabled editing, and instead of adding time as just seconds it is now input as seconds, minutes and hours.
I'm quite pleased with this evening's progress, and I've started to veer away from the book.  It's been a bit of a struggle, but finally I feel as though I really am getting there.
As ever if you want to see and play the app is currently here:
lunch.ben.best
And the latest github commits here:
https://github.com/benjimouse/lunch/commit/c3474cd53bdfde23ec27db1ba5ac4d8a965b7d6e
Of course anything could happen when next I pick up the laptop...

My next few of steps are:

• Be able to mark steps as done or not
• Have steps belong to a "meal"
• Determine the start time based on a provided final time
• Have steps depend on other steps

After that we get into the real fun of making it pretty. I suspect that due to taking some nights off and spending time last night playing with adsense (which it appears is still waiting for a second verification). I'll not quite hit my target of tomorrow night for everything being "working but not pretty", but I'll be close (provided I get to play tomorrow night).  Oh and I still haven't decided what "so you want to" topic I'll choose for tomorrow, I'll probably go with "so you want to build a website..."

sorry

I mentioned that I was thinking of adding google's adsense ads to the blog, which I've now done (and you should be seeing).

I've worked with the internet for a large number of years and although most of it appears to be funded today by ads, it's not an area I've ever touched on.  I'm not really expecting to make much (any) money off of these, it was partially an exercise in learning what happens and how they work.  It's been interesting so far (and was the reason I played with and then messed up my dns).

The how to in the setting up area is really quite good and it's very quick from submitting a request to getting a response (both positive and negative).  Interestingly I don't see the ads in a browser that I'm signed into but it seems to imply that I have some limited control over what gets shown so it could all get interesting.

the story so far...

It appears that I'm starting to fall into a pattern, I get lots done at the start of the week and then Thursday appears and life stuff gets in the way.  This was the case last week with two trips to the theatre and a Christmas party meaning that I've done nothing on "lunch" since last Wednesday.
I've decided to look at where I am, what I've done and what I'm hoping to do in the next week.

What I've done

• I've decided to make an app to aid in the cooking of Christmas dinner
• I've created wireframes
• I've started to build the app
• I've broken the dns for ben.best

Where I am

• You can now see steps and add new ones to the app
• I've fixed the dns for ben.best (so that it ends up here you may need to clear some caches if you've already tried this)

What I'm hoping to do

• By next Monday
• Editing steps
• Sorting out the timings so that given a serve time the start times display correctly
• On Wednesday (17-12-2014)
• Write a how to post similar to the how to set up a mailing list one
• On Friday (19-12-2014)
• Write "friday's interesting things II" based on "friday's interesting things I"
• On next Monday (22-12-2014)
• Write another "story so far post" admitting what I didn't get done from the above list.