Tag: React Components

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 14

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 14

Individual Post Styles
As I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to only show one WordPress post at a time when any package is clicked on. So, that’s what I set about doing today (as the Featured Image above shows). There are a few things I still need to take care of however:

  1. IF the Gift clicked on doe NOT (yet) have a Post for that date, show some kind of “Coming Soon” message.
  2. The Posts need to either be in a Carousel that mirrors the Gift carousel, OR they need to be dynamically loaded by the WP REST API and React based on the ID number (date) of the Gift clicked on.
  3. The “prev” and “next” buttons need some style corrections (like text-alignment and z-index to place them OVER the Post border) as well as functionality.
  4. Ideally, if a user clicks “prev” or “next”, the Post background (dark blue) would remain unchanged, and only the Posts would slide left or right (as a carousel).
Codepen Collection
I was still having trouble with my Gift carousel being off by a few pixels each time the carousel rotated, and then I tried to make the Gifts scale when hovered over:

Oops. What happened?

Well, I decided that since I started having THIS problem with scaling the Gifts AND I was already having trouble with getting the carousel to display and function properly, I probably had an error in my code somewhere that I was overlooking. Therefore, I decided to start breaking apart all the various pieces and components of this project to take a closer look at each of them individually.

It turns out the scale problem was happening because I didn’t have some kind of <div class="gift-wrapper"> surrounding my Gifts. So scale was scaling the CSS image from the center of itself (and thus pushing it out of the center of the page), rather than from the center of the wrapper which would allow it to remain centered in the page. Here’s what it looks like now with a <div class="gift-wrapper">:

In addition to the Gift Component, I also extracted out the Countdown Clock, and the individual Blog Post Component into separate Codepens and added them to a Collection:

  1. Gift Component
  2. Countdown Clock Component
  3. Post Component

From here, it allows me to continue working on the individual Components for the site even from my Windows computer. And once these pieces are perfected, I can then compile them all back together again as a “real” website.

React-ify All the Things!

So, since I’ve now separated out all the Components of the project, I decided it would be a great time to convert my existing HTML into true React Components. Now, the only HTML I have sitting in the Codepens above are:

<div id="react-component-name"></div>

All the markup is now handled entirely by React. And now, I feel like I’m ready to continue with Ray Villalobos’ Course: Building a Web Interface with React.js to learn better how I can get these various Component pieces to interact with each other better.

Side note: One additional thing I learned while working with these React Components is that: in order for jQuery (or any other JavaScript) to work and interact with these Components, React must be allowed to BUILD the Components on the page FIRST – before any other JavaScript functions are declared. Otherwise, jQuery will attempt to bind a "click" function (for example) on a tag that has not yet been created.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 14, 2016
    • More individual styling of REST Posts
    • Break apart the project into Component pieces & create a Codepen Collection
    • Convert all the old HTML into real React Components
  • December 13, 2016
    • Add JS handlers for “Today”
    • Better styling of REST Posts
    • Begin Building a Web Interface with React.js (Lynda.com)
  • December 12, 2016
    • Storybook on Windows (FAIL)
    • Continue styling <Tag> Components
    • Begin responsive styles
  • December 11, 2016
    • Begin separating out CSS per Component
    • Attempt to load in static files & Sass
    • Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts
  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 12

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 12

Storybook on Windows (FAIL)
So, after some good work on React Components in Storybook on my Mac over the weekend, it was back to the office on Monday – and my Windows computer.

Last week, I’d had trouble setting up Storybook on the Windows computer – it kept giving me a sh: start-storybook: command not found error. I found two GitHub issues that were similar to my problem:

  1. ERR! on npm run storybook
  2. sh: start-storybook: command not found

and quickly read through the discussions there to see if I could fix my installation. It didn’t work.

Then, I tried a completely fresh installation of both create-react-app (successful) and getstorybook (less so) to see if that wouldn’t solve the problem and get me up and running on Windows. It didn’t. I got the same errors as before, so that seems to indicate that there may be some compatibility issues with Windows – or maybe I just screwed up something in my system setup from the start.

Well, rather than give this issue any more time (I’d already spent 1-2 hours on it), I decided to move back over to my Codepen version of the site and continue working on some CSS styling.

Continue styling <Tag> Components
As the Featured Image for this Post shows, I decided to continue working on the Tag (and other) CSS since Windows was being picky about my React Storybook configuration.

As far as the Tags go, currently they are CSS shapes, although I feel like there may be some limitations in how I want to handle interactivity with them as CSS shapes. For example: the Tags are currently styled like so:

  1. A <div> box that contains the main text
  2. A div:before that creates the triangular portion of the tag
  3. A div:after that creates the rear Pac-man portion of the tag

So, technically, the Tag is 3 individual pieces as a CSS shape, so doing something like “flipping” it over to read the back (as I’ve done with a sample Lynda.com flip cards menu here) doesn’t seem like it will be very easy. So, I’ve considered two other options:

  1. Create an SVG shape for the Tag (a single item)
  2. Change how I show interactivity – like having some sort of “Christmas-y magic sparkle animation” flow over the To: text before displaying the From: text (and vice versa)

In addition to styling the Tags with CSS, I also added a "disabled" class to all the “gift boxes” in the footer whose dates have not yet come. Ideally, these will be linked up to the big (tagged) gifts and will be controlled by JavaScript (jQuery or React – whichever I work out) to change the date as the countdown clock changes. (i.e. when the clock reads 00:00:01 second remaining for a day, then flips over to the next day, ideally, the "active" Gift would also change.)

Also, the "disabled" tag should prevent users from being able to click on any of those Gifts to view their days “in advance” (and scrolling to dates later than the present date should also be disallowed).

Begin Responsive Styles
Finally, I decided to work on Responsive styling a little bit since the computer I did most of this coding work on in the afternoon had a screen resolution of 1024x768px (and at that size the whole Codepen looked pretty ugly). The following are some of the considerations I need to make when making this site responsive:

  1. Gifts in the footer
    1. Reduce the font size (DONE)
    2. or make the footer scrollable,
    3. or only display only the a few gifts (like some WordPress paging menus with [Prev] ... [12] [13] [14] ... [Next] buttons)
  2. Big gifts
    1. Reduce the size on smaller screens
    2. or scale them smaller
    3. and/or remove/reposition the Tag
  3. Countdown clock
    1. Reduce the size
    2. or stack it vertically to the left or right of the gift
    3. or divide it in two and stack half vertically to the left, half to the right
    4. or remove much of the styling (including the background circles) and turn it into a kind of smaller “digital clock” (as opposed to analog)
  4. Header and top menu
    1. Reduce font size and height (DONE)
    2. Also use a “hamburger” style menu button at very small sizes
  5. React-loading Blog Posts
    1. Still need to figure out how I want these styled initially anyway (title only, title and excerpt, or what) – after that we can figure out responsive styling

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 12, 2016
    • Storybook on Windows (FAIL)
    • Continue styling <Tag> Components
    • Begin responsive styles
  • December 11, 2016
    • Begin separating out CSS per Component
    • Attempt to load in static files & Sass
    • Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts
  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 11

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 11

Begin separating out CSS per Component
The way this create-react-app with Webpack configuration works is that in each ReactJS Component, I need to import the other Components and files that each depends on. For example: import React from 'react' is the first command at the top of every Component in order to load in the ReactJS library to build my Components. The same is true for CSS files.

So, rather than calling import './App.css' in every single file and controlling them all with a single stylesheet, I started breaking the main stylesheet down into separate files that handle each Component individually. In other words, my folder structure went from this:

/js
 |- GiftIcon.js
 |- Gift.js
 |- Tag.js
 |- BlogPost.js
 |- Scene.js
App.css

To this:

/js
 |- GiftIcon.js
 |- Gift.js
 |- Tag.js
 |- BlogPost.js
 |- Scene.js
/css
 |- GiftIcon.css
 |- Gift.css
 |- Tag.css
 |- BlogPost.css
 |- Scene.css
App.css

In some ways, this will now work in a similar manner that my previous Sass configuration was setup to work as. Basically, I wanted to use Sass to subdivide out all the various Component’s CSS into separate files (for easier file management) and then let the Grunt compile them all back together into my main style.css file that would be used by the site.

The only caveat is that I can no longer use Sass variables and mixins (as it stands now). This may or may not prove to be a “deal breaker.” I honestly love the way Sass makes it easy to manage variables (like brand colors or font-stacks) and mixins (like specific component styles – say, buttons, form elements, or boxes of content).

Attempt to load in static files & Sass
There may yet be a way to get Sass back into my project – and I’ll continue investigating this as time goes on. For now, I attempted two solutions to load in static files (like Google Font links) and add Sass back in. Both seem to have not worked as intended, but I may have missed something in the configuration:

  1. Custom Webpack config
    1. This is supposed to help get Sass back into the project. The webpage states: Once you create this webpack.config.js file, Storybook won’t load the default Webpack config other than loading JS files with the Babel loader.
  2. Add Custom Head tags
    1. The instructions here are to create a head.html file that resides inside the Storybook config directory and should inject these tags to the iframe where your components are rendered.
    2. Google Fonts: However, I couldn’t get Google Font links to work immediately, so I’ll need to do some more investigation about that. For now, I’ve just added those with an @import command at the top of my stylesheets.
    3. Font Awesome: I’ve also stored the Font Awesome files and CSS in project directory and used another @import command to load in Font Awesome.
Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts  

While working through the Learn React.js: The Basics videos, there were some that demostrated how to create interactive Components (the project in that Course was to create a Bulletin Board filled with Post-it Notes). So, in a similar vein, I decided to add Gift Tags to the Gifts that would allow users to address them and either Save the names entered onto the Tags, or possibly “Send” them via email or social network. Here’s the plan so far:

  1. Each Gift Component has either a) no tag with the option to add one, or b) an unaddressed, empty tag
  2. The Tag Component can be addressed with a To: and From: address
  3. On :hover, the Tag will flip over to reveal From: (it will show To: on the front by default)
  4. To: will provide space for a name, and an optional email address (or possibly social network URL)
  5. From: will default to “Santa Clause” or “Saint Nick” or “St. Nicholas” (assigned at random), but can be modified and saved
  6. Each Tag will (maybe) contain social network buttons (Facebook, Twitter, and Email primarily) to which users can send that particular (Gift – i.e. Blog Post)

I haven’t yet worked out HOW the sending of Blog Posts should be handled with the Tag Component, but so far, this is the roadmap and “ideal” plan.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 11, 2016
    • Begin separating out CSS per Component
    • Attempt to load in static files & Sass
    • Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts
  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 10

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 10

Finish Lynda.com videos
Today I finished the Lynda.com Course Learn React.js: The Basics. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways from the Course:

  1. React IS actually incredibly fast
  2. React syntax may be new (to me) but doesn’t feel unfamiliar (it’s a kind of XML)
  3. React sites are built with React Components (each with props and state)
  4. Each React Component has a “lifecycle” (mounting, updating, and unmounting)
  5. React Components can utilize parent-child relationships
Get all React Components working
After a bit of debugging and editing, I was able to get (my version of) each of the React Components in the Lynda.com Course working – including in Storybook. I’ve also updated by public Gist on the basics to include correct syntax and comments.

I noticed two of my most common errors in my original React syntax were:

  1. If you want to string together functions separated by commas, like an Object (i.e. getInitialState() {...}, componentWillMount() {...}, render() {...}, then you MUST use the React Native syntax (var MyComponent = React.createClass() {...}) and NOT ES6 syntax nor the stateless functional syntax.
  2. For some reason, I’d accidentally had an extra closing curly bracket } after my render() function – this was producing the “horrible error message” I mentioned yesterday. But at least now I learned what to look for the next time.

Begin creating a Christmas Scene  
Finally, I started putting everything together into a kind of Christmas “scene” (as evidenced by the Featured Image on this Post). I DEFINITELY feel like React is useful for creating parent-child relationships between Components and for allowing me to dynamically create, add, or remove Components based on the code.

For example, the image above was created using code for Scene.js (the parent Component) and Gift.js (the child Component). Scene.js called Gift.js 25 times and looped through it to create 25 separate Components – each with its own unique ID and properties. This will definitely prove to be useful when I start looking into pulling in blog Posts from WordPress using the WP REST API.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 9 (5 React Configurations)

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 9

create-react-app
Yesterday I was having some trouble with my React code functioning properly with the in-browser Babel compilation. Notably, I kept running into this error:

which clearly isn’t very helpful for debugging my code.

For one thing, sometimes the error message seemed to point to an empty line! I’d read on StackOverflow (somewhere) that perhaps that indicated the error was actually in the line ABOVE it, but it wasn’t. And I still couldn’t find where there was a problem no matter how much I looked, nor how many times I rewrote the code.

Finally I decided enough was enough and I was going to have to include Babel and all the other dependencies inside my project to compile everything there, rather than continuing to import Babel via CDN and try to compile in the browser. I figured if nothing else, at least I’d get some better error messages with code that was pre-compiled before being loaded by the browser.

So, on the suggestion of the Lynda.com video series I’ve been watching, I decided to create a totally NEW folder and install create-react-app via npm to help out.

npm install -g create-react-app
create-react-app advent-calendar
cd advent-calendar
npm start

Fortunately, after installing it and running the npm start process to watch and compile my files, I was immediately greeted with a MUCH more helpful big, bold, and beautiful (descriptive) full-screen error message:

This allowed me to properly diagnose my problems, debug the code, and get everything running smoothly. At first.

React Storybook
Actually, the FOUR setups I tried are very different:

  1. React + Axios in a Codepen
    1. Incredibly painless as all the configuration is provided by Codepen
    2. Easy to get started due to the number and quality of samples available
    3. Only requires linking to some scripts (react.js and axios.js) and enabling Babel as your JS preprocessor
    4. DOESN’T actually teach you a lot about how to set these technologies up and use them in a real-world project
  2. React + Babel + Grunt
    1. It requires a complete manual setup (installing everything you want via npm)
    2. More difficult for a first attempt to get everything configured properly
    3. But allows more precise control over exactly what you include in the project
  3. React and Babel via CDN
    1. It’s as simple as copying in a few URLs as <link> tags
    2. Easy to get started, but provides horrible error messages that are little help
    3. Requires NO node modules nor unique file/folder structure – you could build everything out as a regular static page (index.html, style.css, and React scripts before the closing <body> tag)
  4. React with create-react-app and webpack
    1. Super easy installation and process to get things up and running via npm (see code snippet above)
    2. Much more helpful error messages (like the one in black above) that can help you easily diagnose and fix problems with your code
    3. Includes TONS of node modules – many of which you may never need
    4. Requires its own file/folder structure that may be confusing at first (all your .css files and React components are abstracted out into a /src folder that will be compiled into .css and .js files with a hash string appended to the end like a version number (app.d587bbd6e38337f5accd.js) and put in the /public folder when you do npm run build to get it ready for deployment)
    5. Requires digging deeper into more technologies you may or may not have ever heard of before. For example, for me, I’ve only now ever HEARD of:
      1. webpack
      2. flux
      3. redux
      4. storybook

I haven’t even visited the websites for webpack, flux, or redux yet, but storybook instantly had me interested because of what it allows you to do: “Developing Components in Isolation.” I knew immediately that this was something I’d want to try – since I have multiple Components I will be developing:

  • First of all, Test Components to help learn React better
  • Secondly, a Gift Component for my CSS gift shapes
  • Also, a Post Component for blog posts loaded with the WP REST API
  • Possibly also other Christmas Components – like a Santa, or tree, or reindeer

So, I set about the work of figuring out how to get Storybook up and running (for my 5th React setup). A few things I noticed about Storybook:

  1. React + Storybook
    1. create-react-app uses npm start to run a server though port :3000
    2. Storybook defaults to run a server through either port :9001 or :9009
    3. Adding static .css or .js files can be a pain because of the configuration and how Storybook compiles things. There are really only two ways to do it:
      1. Add Custom <head> tags
      2. Serve static files via imports or a directory
      3. I ended up just using the CSS @import rule to load my Google Fonts
    4. Storybook was designed to develop Components in isolation – and it’s really a great way to perfect individual parts before putting them all together again in the main App
    5. Adding in additional Stories is pretty straightforward once you get through the configuration
Update npm and node and figure out git  
One of my biggest issues throughout developing this project has been that I have two completely different setups to work with throughout the day:

  1. At work: Windows 7
  2. At home: MacOS

That means that no matter where I go, for half the day at least, my configuration is going to be totally different. So, whenever I spend a few hours in one location learning how to setup and configure some part of my setup, I must then (at least partially) repeat that process in the other location later that day. It can be a little monotonous, but honestly the repetition is probably really good for my learning (that, and blogging about it).

Three things that seem like they may be larger “speed bumps” than they probably should be are: npm, node, and git

  1. At work: after installing create-react-app and the various other parts I needed, I kept noticing that the Command Line was prompting me with warnings about my (outdated) versions of npm and node. I didn’t really think much of it, but noticed that the installation of those modules took significant time (I ate lunch during the process)
  2. At home: When I came home later in the evening, I started getting the same errors, but again thought nothing of it – until my Mac froze up (it happens sometimes when I have a bunch of programs and Chrome tabs open and I haven’t shut down in a month…) So, after restarting the Mac, I decided to immediately update npm and node and WOW! what a difference that made! The installation of create-react-app and the Node modules FLEW compared to earlier. Below is the series of (Mac) commands I used in the Terminal to update them:
npm install npm@latest -g
sudo npm cache clean -f
sudo npm install -g n
sudo n stable

Finally, git. At first, I was worried that with the two different setups on the two different systems that git would prove to be problematic. I was worried that I might have to either memorize the differences in files and setup between Windows and Mac, or create two separate package.json and other relevant files.

However, after looking over the config files from both my Windows and Mac setups (I set up two completely different folders with the files from each system), I no longer think that’s the case. They look nearly identical and a few minor version number changes in the dependencies won’t really matter (down a version number).

So… Day 9 was a LONG day (which is why this blog post is long – and why I’m “technically” publishing it on Day 10), but it was a good day – not entirely productive in code, but very helpful in my learning more about React and how to work with it.

Today, I’m planning to finish React.js: The Basics on Lynda.com, create some new Components, possibly add in Sass (again) to my create-react-app project, and possibly add some interactivity to my Christmas Gift Component. Stay tuned!~

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu