End of Week 5 Update

Things are coming along pretty well here at camp. We wrapped up the admin dashboard for Fund.io this week, complete with database driven tables for campaigns and comments, graphs for sitewide stats and key performance indicators.

We incorporated some pretty cool features like ajax page updating (which allows the database to be updated and shown on the page instantaneously without reloading the page), and a modal for displaying details about an item without leaving the current page. I also redesigned the front-end slider with a new parallax background effect. When the site goes live, I'll be sure to post links.

I've got a good head start on Goalizr as well. Officially, we were supposed to get started next week on our personal projects, but I heeded the advice of some of the previous campers and started working on it a while back.

For practice, and to learn the latest features in Visual Studio, I migrated my initial solution from VS2012 to VS2013 so it's now running on .NET 4.5.1, MVC 5, Entity Framework 6, and Bootstrap 3. I have a working CRUD for goals, activities &  emotional states, ability to add new users, and a login system that allows logging in with an external API, like Google. Currently, the app is using a basic Bootstrap theme, but I have some mockups in Photoshop I'll be trying to implement for the front-end of the site using HTML5 and CSS3.

Inspired by some of my fellow campers blogs, I'm going to try to post more specific code examples and how-to's pertaining to the technologies I'm using to build my project. It may or may not be helpful to others, but at least I'll have a record of the whole process for me to go back to.

In addition to my personal project, I've been brainstorming with a few of my classmates about getting their own projects up and running. One is an online Jeopardy game for learning C# terms and definitions. Another is a site that allows independent comic book/graphic novel creators to promote and sell their work online. And the other is a site that connects writers and artists and helps them work together to develop children's books, comics, graphic novels, book covers and more. Pretty excited about helping out on these projects too...