Starting with BrowserHistory1, I decided to take Professor Port’s suggestion by trying out the WOD without watching the screencast first. As expected, I took a long time to complete it, specifically a DNF time over 30 minutes. I was very discouraged and frustrated that it took me this long, but continued to trust the process and tried completing the WOD the right way. Next, I watched the screencast a couple of times, mainly focusing on the areas I had the most trouble with. While watching the screencast, I tried comparing the way he did his code with how I did mine. When I decided that I was ready, I erased everything and tried it all over again. It took me four tries, but I finally got my time down to 12 minutes. The part I had most trouble with was creating an itemized list and linking them to the four internal sections. I overcame this by engraining the idea in my head that I am creating “a name” for each title and referencing it in my “Table of Contents.” What I took from this WOD was recognizing that trying the WOD out before watching the screencast is a beneficial way to learn and constantly has your brain running.
I had the most trouble with BrowserHistory2. The first time trying it without watching the screencast took me well-over 2 hours before I decided to watch the screencast. Comparing my code with the professor’s code, it was very similar. The way I linked my style.css file in my index.html file and the code within my style.css seemed to be similar, but the personalizations from my style.css file didn’t seem to appear on my web browser. Feeling helpless and not knowing how else to link my html file to my css file, I used google. After playing around with different tags, I finally got my html page to connect with my css page. I tried to record a new screencast but my problem this time was that the personalizations would not go away, even if I refreshed the page 10+ times. In other words, before I even added anything to my .css file, the page was already completed with my past .css code no matter how many times I reloaded it. I re-did the screencast 5 times before I found out that this problem could’ve been simply resolved with changing my chrome cache settings. All in all, I was able to finish this WOD in 7 minutes on my 5th try. The lesson I took from this WOD is to accept that sometimes we all make dumb mistakes.
Starting BrowserHistory3 on my own, I was immediately lost with all the different tags that I had to add in my .html file. The .css file also required a lot of different elements that I had trouble getting familiar with. My first attempt at this WOD took me over an hour. Even with this time, my page looked nothing like the example because I was missing a lot of style elements. After my first attempt, I decided to watch and follow the screencast step by step. This helped me a lot and allowed me to have an idea on the types of elements that were needed to get my page looking closer to the example. I then deleted everything and practiced on my own a couple more times before attempting it a second time. I think this method worked best for me, as I got to get comfortable with the process in my own way, also feeling less pressure without the clock and screen recording running. In the end, it took me a total of 4 tries before I finally got an Rx time of 7 minutes. The part I had most trouble with was making the 3 columns equal. Text would also run off into another column even if all my tags were right. I ended up placing break tags where the words needed to be cut off which ultimately worked out for my page in the end. The lesson I took from this WOD is to understand that even if your code is identical to the screencast example, things can go wrong and you just have to find your own way to fix it.