Part 2 of 2 (Shoutout to Lydia for the artistic direction)
I had to build a quick app for my JQuery/AJAX assessment, so naturally I made a To Read List app (since I might as well stick with the theme). Even after a lot of reading and tutorials on JQuery, I didn’t really understand the whole idea of a rails API backend. I kept getting really frustrated because the data from my GET requests kept rendering as this thing that looked like a hash (which I lated realized was JSON) instead of html, and suddenly it clicked that that was literally exactly what was supposed to happen and that that was what the point of building your own API was.
So I just created a really simple app that lets you enter book titles and have them immediately appear. You can delete and check off books, as well as edit the information for each book without refreshing the page. I also used the Devise gem (which I am beginning to love) to allow users to login/logout.
I was reluctant to style this app at all because I was so sick of only styling Book Up for the past week, but thankfully, my styling expert, Lydia, was on hand to select fonts and colors for me. So in the end I didn’t have much to do but center and pad a few divs. Working with Lydia is actually a dream because she insists on sending you links and hex codes again just so you don’t have to go through your texts to find them. Also once I tried to open a new tab to look up a google fonts import code and Lydia insisted on getting that for me too.
Also deserving of mention is Alayna, who spent the car ride back from her college orientation entering books into the Book Up database. Alayna once promised me that I wouldn’t believe the number of books she put into the database in 48 hours and I am proud and happy to say that she was right.
Stay tuned for bigger and better reflections this week.
