Proposals

JQuery allows for the implementation of programming done by others into your own site. I had two goals in mind when I reviewed what JQuery is. Firstly, I thought I could use JQuery to better organize the Beginners section on my site. I could enhance it with images, an embedded video, and have tabs to click to show only the information requested by the user. This will increase the professionalism of the presentation and increase the speed and time that personas can get what information they want.

Secondly, I plan to implement an external table sorter to replace the large and somewhat higher maintenance table sorting JavaScript code I have written myself. By using someone else’s creation, I can likely increase the maintainability of my site to make it less time consuming to add content. It’s not that my code is bad, but it’s more believing that a better option exists out there in an existing library that I can implement into my site. I have one in mind that I found while exploring via Google, but I do not want to commit to it if the implementation is too difficult.

Here is the page with JavaScript implementation of the table sorting program I wrote, which will be lost when replaced with the revamped sorter I plan to implement this Unit:

http://student.athabascau.ca/~davidbo56/reviewsUnit5.htm

Both proposed implementations greatly enhance the functionality of my site and the user experience. For accessibility and compatibility concerns, a simple NOSCRIPT element will provide the same information at a lower level experience. I am not overly concerned about the small amount of space duplicating the information will take up as the size of the text on my page is minimal.

Implementation

I used JQuery to make the beginners section look a little nicer and added images to it. I relied on https://jquery.com/ and https://www.w3schools.com/jquery/default.asp and implemented the toggle method into the beginners section to more or less get more comfortable with JQuery. I really enjoyed this, and it was relatively straight forward. It made my site appear more like a legitimate website, too, and not something from the old GeoCities days. If you don’t understand the reference, please check out the story at this link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/525315/15-megabytes-fame-geocities-story. Indeed, the expanding of subsections in the beginners section looks really awesome, and doesn’t take a tremendously long amount of time to load. I also used this opportunity to add a few more images from my collection images from my summer of exploration.

What I am happy about is that without scripting active, the page is still very readable. This implementation, although minor, gave me a deeper understanding of how JQuery works, so when I implemented proposal two, it went smoothly. Indeed, this was the case. I implemented tablesorter, from https://mottie.github.io/tablesorter/ on my reviews page and released my articles section. This was super simple to implement, but I did decide against using their packaged CSS sheet to style the table. The reason I did this was because I wanted to make sure my page didn’t start looking busy with too many colors. This is fueled by user feedback I got from coworkers where their compliments had a reoccurring theme: simplicity and ease of use and navigation. This is exactly what I was aiming for to satisfy the personas of Unit 1. Releasing the articles section is not quite at the same scope as described in my site outline (no inhouse articles), but the source of information available is very readable, sortable, and organized well. The articles section meets the needs outlined in my original plans.

I decided to upload the JQuery library to ensure maximum compatibility with my site, but I realize there is a risk of using and continuing to use depreciated code as time goes on with keeping a copy of the library on my site as opposed to linking to the JQuery library from an external source.

If I had to do it again, I would look at their additional mods and plugins for their library and allow for a search box. Admittingly, at 6 current reviews, this is not needed, but as I add more to my page if I continue to maintain it after this course, a search box may become very useful to filter only easy hikes or find a particular hike by name. It is this unit that gave me a larger appreciation for the type of applications a person can develop for “just” a webpage. My pages will look and interact like something from GeoCities no longer and I feel like my site has really come together.

  - Unit 6 Submission