teaching machines

CS 347: Webdev Blog

August 31, 2020 by . Filed under fall-2020, specifications, webdev.

This semester you will document your learning of web development in a blog that you serve out via the Apache web server. Each week you will write a short entry responding to some articles you’ve read or videos you watched on some aspect of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or web development in general about which you are curious. Use external source material, not the videos or posts from your instructor.

Each post that you write consists of the following:

Add a link to each new post in your blog’s index.html file. Make sure your instructor can see the links to all of your posts upon visiting http://YOUR-IP-ADDRESS:8000.

If an entry meets all the requirements, you will receive 2 points. If you meet some, you will receive 1 point. If your blog post is not visible on Friday, when your instructor reads through all posts, you will receive 0 points.

You are encouraged to write this blog and test it on your local machine and publish it to your web server when it’s ready. The remainder of this document describes how to set up a standard workflow for developing and deploying websites that uses Visual Studio Code, Git, and Apache.

Install Git

Follow these directions to install Git or see if you already have it installed. Do not install GitHub Desktop. We only need the core Git, which is a set of command-line tools that we will run with the help of Visual Studio Code.

Create Local Repository

Follow these steps to set up a folder on your local machine in which you can construct, modify, and test your site without having to deal with an internet connection and a web server.

Your changes are now recorded to your local Git repository. Next we mirror those changes on a version of our repository hosted by a remote Git provider.

Create Remote Repository

Follow these steps to create a centralized version of your repository that you can access from your local machine and from your webserver.

Clone on Droplet

Follow these steps to pull the centralized version of your repository down onto your droplet.

Configure Apache

Follow these steps to share the working directory of this new clone with the world via the Apache web server.

Weekly Workflow

Many of the steps above are needed only for your initial one-time setup. Each week, follow this much simpler workflow: