Search This Blog

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Always pays to re-inspect code!

... particularly when it comes to Google Chart API's.

I'm always checking in on the live versions of my example portfolio sites and I recently came across a page with a chart that was failing to load. Ultimately, I traced it back to an error in the fetched data set that had ultimately been corrected.

js file updated and uploaded to GitHub.

Back in business!

Friday, August 10, 2018

UPDATE: LinkedIn, Portfolio site and...writing samples!

Long hot summer so far, but I've been working on a few small side projects while gearing up for the Fall.

During some of this down time I've been making some tweaks to my LinkedIn profile, including links back to my portfolio site (25HD) as well as a new collection of writing samples hosted on  journoportfolio.com.

The new site gathers together a series of technical and creative writing pieces I've composed over the last few years, including several that were researched during my Certificate program at UW.

On the technical side, it was an interesting bit of a challenge to hack my portfolio site so that I could control the image displayed when shared to LinkedIn. Being a WordPress template, I had no direct access to the site meta tags, but I discovered that a third-party plug-in (Head Meta Data) would allow me to implement my own in addition to the ones that were already present. LinkedIn is pretty up front about what meta tags are necessary for proper social media sharing to their site, so it was just a matter of finding the direct URL for the graphic I wanted to use. After allowing some time for propagation, I was able to attach a link for 25HD to my LinkedIn profile using the intended image.

Fortunately, journoportfolio had this all covered, and actually provides a section in their configuration section for what image and/or text to display for social media sharing.

Again, I wanted to make mention of a great royalty-free image site unsplash.com that I utilized for the writing samples portfolio. Great selection of high-quality images, free to use with attribution. I would like to take the opportunity here to acknowledge the photographers who provided the images for my site: Nathaniel Shuman, Dimitri Popov, Alexander Andrews, Joanna Kosinska, and Jess Waters.