Momentum

Whenever working on a project, it seems that the first few steps are the most difficult. Whenever that blank screen appears when loading up the local server, it seems so daunting to get going on anything. Once I get past that point, things seem to get a lot easier. I've talked about it in the past few days a bit, but just to recap, I was hired on by my aunt to recreate her website for their business a while back, but just now really cleared my plate so I can give it my full attention. The website they have right now is written with Wordpress and, since I have no desire to learn anything about Wordpress yet, I decided to write the whole thing in React. Actually, I initially thought I would write it using Gatsby, but decided against that when I started getting in the weeds with all of their plugins. I realized I was spending more time researching packages and plugins than just writing the code. I was also using Material UI when I first started, which I love, but is a really complicated system to get involved with. I backed down from both of these fronts and settled on writing it with React and Semantic UI, my home turf.

2 or 3 days ago, I started scaffolding the project and ran into immediate problems. Apparently, it's been a while since I wrote any plain React apps using Create-React-App, meaning like it's maybe been a month and a half. In that period of time, things have changed with CRA. They've gone away from using CRA as a global package and it's now strictly used with NPX. I tried to create my app about 5 times before I googled what was going on. Every time I launched my app, it was pretty much completely empty. I don't know when, but they've also added the ability to install CRA with templates, which is similar to what Gatsby does. This may have been a feature for a while and I was just ignorant of it, but it's actually really cool. There are templates for Redux and React-Router, as well as seemingly hundreds of others that help the creator set up the scaffolding of the project. I decided to give the React-Router template a try, and it worked really well. It really didn't add much to the original CRA, but the potential is massive. As I said, Gatsby does a similar thing that allows the creator to start out with a site that's already hooked up to work with Contentful, Material UI, or a bunch of other tools. Given that the scaffolding isn't anything really unique and just comes down to remembering the steps to take or looking them up, I'm all for skipping that and getting right to work on the content creation.

After I got all set up, I started working on the easiest page first, the contact page. I actually got it to a point where it's a lot better looking than it was before. I will still tinker with this a little further, but it's pretty close to finished. I moved on to the portfolio, which is a simple grid as it stands now. My plan is to make it a little more interesting by adding different sized elements in the grid instead of every one being the same size. I have the basic scaffolding of this set up now, but there's some serious work to do still. I moved on to the about page, which has a lot of content, but turned out to be pretty straightforward when I started thinking about it in terms of being a grid. I knocked that out today, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I moved on to the home page and hit a huge roadblock. The home page right now has a full-page-sized hero image slideshow, which, when I first looked at it, thought would be simple enough. It's given me fits, so far, and I'm actually going to leave it with a filler image and move on to the rest of the home page, as to not get completely bogged down. This leaves me with a little more work to do on the home page and the totality of the latest news page. This page is completely scattered right now, and I'm going to start over from scratch with it, making it a single-column grid with each article on a row going down the screen, or maybe two columns of articles on each row, depending on how it ends up looking. I would say I've done about 30% of the total work so far, but most of it has been the easy stuff. The further I get in, the harder it's going to be.