This week we covered various topics in class including working in the terminal, using Git, installing WordPress locally as well as setting it up on live development, and learning a bit about how web hosting works. I enjoyed this week greatly.
Terminal is an old friend, and I feel quite at home here. I have used it fairly extensively in the past in the programming classes I took while in college. Recently, I was working on a project to keep track of student grades, and I decided to do everything in the terminal using the text editor Vim. It takes a bit to get used to, as you don’t use the mouse to click and highlight, but rather specific keyboard instructions. For example, to open the file, type “vim filename” at the command line. Once the file is open, you can hit the “i” key to begin typing text before the cursor. If you need to move around, you use the up and down arrows. In order to save the document, you must first get out of edit mode by typing escape. Then you type “:w”, in order to write the file. If you want to quit and save you must hit esc then type “:wq”, to write and quit. I recommend using a command line text editor at least once, in case there is ever a time when the editing must be done at the terminal. As a bonus, it sure made me feel like a “real” programmer!
I already had an account on Github, but I hadn’t used it in awhile, so the little refresher was useful. I would, however, have loved to go more in depth on both of these topics as the discussion rather skimmed the surface, and I there is so much more to learn.
The most exciting topic this week, however, was how web hosting works and installing WordPress live. At my current job, there is a subdomain of the main website used as an intranet. This was set up in Drupal about six years ago and is in dire need of upgrade and site maintenance. As there is no dedicated IT person, it falls on me to work out any IT related issues for the company – a small business consisting of two restaurants with a third opening soon. Not having much experience in setting up and maintaining a website, I have been hesitant to experiment on the live version. The lecture this week clarified for me how the website is set up on the web hosting company (as a subdomain), and I got an overview of the file structure, in particular the htdocs (or public_htm) folder where the content management system installation is placed. I am looking forward to playing with my live website and also to delving deeper into the file structure as last week we received a general overview. However, I am definitely feeling empowered in terms of tackling the job of upgrading Drupal and organizing the content currently hosted there by the company I work for.