Struggling

After investing 2-3weeks of time into it I decided to get some advice from my tutors. It turned out to be that none of them use asp.net and was advised to look into PHP. Asp.net runs on a local machine and not all web-hosting companies support it so there wasn’t a way for me to submit my work at the end of the term as well.

I don’t think it’s the right time for me to switch over to PHP now as I have left it to too late. I tried my best to make things work but I didn’t have enough knowledge and a skill to make things work and above all, time keeping.

Errors

Layout

Choosing a programming language

I started to look into asp.net and how similar dynamic websites are created. There was no reason why I decided to follow the asp.net route rather than PHP as I’m totally new to both and have no background knowledge in programming. Asp.net is by Microsoft for window’s user however there is a Mac version of it called Mono Develop.

I started by following the forums on asp.net main website and video tutorials available on YouTube. In order to make visual studio work (program that runs asp.net) I installed IIS7 and Xampp. Xampp is a package that installs Apache, PHP and MySQL together rather than individual packages. I do feel that my settings for IIS7 weren’t quite right as every time I entered localhost under web address bar IIS7 default webpage would turn up and once Xampp was installed the homepage of Xampp appeared. Though it seemed like it was detecting where the localhost was it still felt as if something was wrong or missing.

When I changed the setting of IIS7 it created a folder on my C drive called inetpub, which contained subfolders and one of them was called wwwroot. According to some articles if my asp.net files were inside the wwwroot folder it would run but in my case it wasn’t true. The only asp.net that actually worked were the once I created in Visual Studio through video tutorials, apart from that nothing worked. I managed to get hold of some asp.net projects from web, simply to see how other people have worked and find a way out for myself. Allow browsing other projects I couldn’t even open them. I don’t think I know how to import a project in Visual Studio because every time I did, it gave me errors. I tried number of time and with different file extensions such as asp/ asp.net/ asp.net and Ajax.

Change of Ideas

While researching into pachube, Arduino and Yahoo pipes I was stressing myself out way more than enjoying the project. The manipulation of applications is new to me and going through forums and discussions; scared me. I tried to push myself into my proposed project but it was getting nowhere so I decided to take a fresh start. I realize it’s a bit too late to change however there is no point of me sticking to something I no longer desired to do.

At this point I decided to separate Experimental media and Designing social software and write individual proposals for both.

Pachube

http://www.haque.co.uk/eeml.php
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/how-to-create-a-mashup-by-combining-3-different-apis/
http://apps.pachube.com/
http://community.pachube.com/
http://jtlog.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/pachube-and-yahoo-pipes-part-1-show-me-the-data/
http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/13
http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/12
http://community.pachube.com/node/390
http://apps.pachube.com/alert/
http://dailyduino.com/archives/616

Research - Pachube

I would say I’m weak when it comes to do the coding and this was one of the reasons why I wanted to avoid Arduino but on the other side pachube is new and I wanted to experiment with it. I am not expecting things to go right for me although the project holds a big value towards my degree.

Areas of Research:
http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/12
http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/13
http://community.pachube.com/node/390
http://apps.pachube.com/alert/
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/how-to-create-a-mashup-by-combining-3-different-apis/