Work This Week – Week 2

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Flux Tower Data


I’ve got some flux tower data.
The chart above may mean something. I have no idea. I let Google make it.

The stuff I want to do is a bit more complex. You can see elements of the interaction here and here. I’m also considering how much data I might be dealing with so I’ve got my eye on options that let you zoom and pan on large data sets.

These javascript based interactive charts are a place I’ve wandered before because of my interest in explorable explanations.

Text SetS

I’m not thrilled with the look but I moved the theme to Understrap (another Bootstrap-based WordPress theme). I made a child theme and am using Gulp and SCSS for the first time. Not a huge stride but I haven’t taken the time to figure out the details behind making this work previously. It’s not hard but it was unfamiliar enough to be a speedbump I couldn’t afford in previous projects . . . just a bit too much additional load. While I don’t have anyone I’m working with, I am trying out various workflows to figure out if I can do some of this stuff faster/better. In some ways working alone makes that easier. I only have to agree with myself but I also don’t know if the process translates well for others.

Histology

I thought I knew their structure but I didn’t get it fully. Even after they explained it, I’m still not sure their structure makes sense to me. There’s the ‘can-you-technically-do-what-people-want’ aspect of the job and then there’s all the other stuff. Can I understand their mindset? Can I understand the intent? Can I expand or improve what they’re thinking based on different things I might know? That kind of thing eats up time.

I did use a little bit of the structure I’d built for this ( which I forked from Codepen) to do something for another project. The same pieces allowed me to make a page template to switch between two different TAGS archive displays. The page template portion is here. The javascript is here. The javascript is setup so that the $ stuff for jQuery will work in WordPress.

Gravity Forms Field Cleaner

This one checks if a particular field in a particular form has a leading @ symbol, if so, it removes it. This is just a tiny bit of data sanitation to keep from having to erase @ symbols to make other stuff work properly.

//GRAVITY FORMS CLEANER
add_filter( 'gform_save_field_value_1_2', 'twitterCleaner', 10, 5 ); //which hook (gform_save_field_value) for which form (1) for which field (2)

function twitterCleaner() {
 $value = rgpost( "input_2" );//which field
  $len = strlen ($value);//how long is the string
  if ( substr($value,0,1) ==='@') { //if the first char is @ then . . .
  	  $value = substr($value, 1, ($len-1)); //make a substring that starts after the first char
  } 
  return $value;//set it as the new value
}

Another WP Presentation

I did another WordPress presentation for the medical campus. It went fine. Once again, pretty low attendance. We had 4 or 5 people. Their focus was mainly on productivity. I’ve gotten somewhat better at the whole page/post and categories/tags thing. It is true-ish but real truth there is not what humans want.

There are two functional elements where WP shines for people. It lets us have users from outside VCU and allows people to submit content in a structured way that can go public.

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