E49: Digits, Part 1 (Landing Page)

For this experience, you will start designing a simple Meteor application called Digits. When you are finished, the home page should look something like this (although the picture and color scheme might be different):

Prelude

First, find a picture to use for the cover image. Make sure it’s at least 1000px wide.

Second, I suggest you watch my screencast before trying this WOD for the first time. I have not been able to find suitable resources for you to read prior to doing this WOD to cover all of the Meteor concepts I will cover. So, it’s best for you to watch the solution one time through to orient yourself. You may want to take notes if you see things you need to remember.

Third, be sure to watch my video on branching and merging in GitHub desktop. You will be required to branch and merge for this series of practice WODs.

Finally, be sure to review the chapters of the Meteor Guide listed in the Readings section. They provide a wealth of information to help you understand application development in Meteor.

Install the template

Prior to starting the timed part of the WOD, you should set up your repo and install the template.

Create a private repo called “digits”, using meteor-application-template-react as a template. Clone this repo to your laptop, run meteor npm install and then meteor npm run start to bring it up.
Create an IntelliJ project called digits that points to your repo. Check to make sure that ESLint is running by creating an ESLint error, such as two newlines at the end of the file.

The WOD

Now you’re ready to do this practice WOD. There are two rounds to this WOD, each timed individually.

Pedagogy Alert! You might be tempted to do this WOD by stepping through the video frame by frame and copying what I do. That is very dangerous: you will simply trick yourself into thinking you've learned the material, but you've actually only learned how to copy and paste what I do. The way to learn the material is to watch the screencast, take notes if useful, then try to do the WOD without looking at the screencast.

Round 1

Start your timer.

1. Create a branch to hold your work.

Create a branch called landing-page-1 using GitHub Desktop, and publish this branch to GitHub.

If you haven’t already, start up your application using meteor npm run start. Check to see that it’s running at http://localhost:3000. Take a look at the console to be sure there are no errors.

Pro Tip: run your app within the Terminal window in IntelliJ, and keep Chrome Dev Tools open during development. Install Meteor Dev Tools Enhanced if you haven’t already.

2. Update titles to say “digits”.

Edit app/client/main.html and app/imports/ui/components/NavBar.jsx to say “digits” rather meteor-application-template.

3. Add background image.

Add your background image to the landing page:

Copy your image file into app/public/images/.
Create a CSS class in app/client/style.css that specifies the background and background-size properties as you’ve done previously for background images.
Wrap the Landing component return value with a div that specifies your CSS class. Now the middle section of the landing will have your image as a background.

When you’ve gotten to here, your landing page should look similar to this:

4. Update landing page text.

Replace the text and images appearing in front of your image in the Landing component:

Use a Grid with container, centered, and stackable properties. Specify that it has three columns.
Each Grid.Column has textAlign='center', and contains an Icon, an H1 header, and an H3 header. The headers are inverted to make their font color white.

Now your landing page should look similar to this:

5. Update background color.

Provide a consistent background color.

First, select one of the Semantic UI default theme colors. I chose ‘blue’, but you can choose a different color to match your background image.
Find out the hex color value corresponding to your color. One way to do this is to open node_modules/semantic-ui-css/semantic.css and search for your color. I found that blue is #2185D0.
In app/client/main.html, add a style attribute to the body element to specify the background-color property.
In app/imports/ui/components/NavBar.jsx, add color='blue' to the Menu element.
In the Footer component, add color: 'white' to the divStyle object to make the footer text white.

When you’ve finished this part, your landing page mockup should look like this:

6. Check for ESLint errors.

Finally, exit Meteor, and invoke meteor npm run lint to run ESLint over your entire program. If you discover any ESLint errors, then fix them.

7. Commit your finished work.

When you’re done:

control-c to stop Meteor.
Stop your timer and note your time.
Commit and push your landing-page-1 branch to GitHub with the message ‘landing page mockup finished in NN minutes.’, where NN is the number of minutes it took you to do it according to your timer.

Round 2

To ensure that you understand this material, you should do this WOD a second time.

Switch back to the master branch. This will revert your local repo to its state just after the installation of the template.

Create a new branch called landing-page-2.

Go through the WOD again. When you’re done, commit and push your landing-page-2 branch to GitHub with the message ‘landing page mockup finished in NN minutes.’, where NN is the number of minutes it took you to do it according to your timer.

Your TA will check whether both branches are in GitHub. Remember to give your TA access to your repository.

Rx: <20 min Av: 20-25 min Sd: 25-30 min DNF: 30+ min

Demonstration

Here’s a screencast of me working through this problem. You can watch this prior to attempting it for the first time yourself.

Submission instructions

By the time and date indicated on the Schedule page, submit this assignment via Laulima.

You must grant read access to this repo to the TA for your section. To do this:

Retrieve your repository in a browser, then click on “Settings”. Depending upon the GitHub UI you are provided, you’ll then click on either “Collaborators” or “Manage Access”. Let us know if you can’t find either of these.
Search for “bsogata”, then click “Add collaborator”.

Your submission should contain:

A link to each branch of the GitHub repository created as a result of your latest attempt at this practice WOD. Make sure you include the complete URLs for all branches so that I can click on them in my mailer. Note: the final commit for these branches must have been made before the submission time and date, otherwise you will not receive credit for this assignment.

You will receive full credit for this practice WOD as long as you have attempted it the required number of times and submitted the email with all required data before the due date. Your code does not have to run perfectly for you to receive full credit. However, if you do not repeat each practice WOD until you can finish it successfully in at least AV time, you are unlikely to do well on the in-class WOD. To reduce the stress associated with this course, I recommend that you repeat each practice WOD as many times as necessary to achieve at least AV before its due date.