Christmas is over. So why haven’t I taken down my extraordinary (pink) Christmas tree?  If the preceeding question doesn’t answer itself, then we have nothing left to talk about.

But I wanted to explain (read: brag about) my awesome side projects (Christmas presents) that were done in addition to completing a quarter at school and setting up an entirely new website at the internship (to go live sometime this month!).

First challenge: A “Worry Wart” website for Mom/every woman in the world to store worries for them. This needed a database, tables interacting with each other, a somewhat secure way to access, read, and write to the database, login, log out, create a new user, store session variables, count worries that came true vs worries that never happened, add and delete worries.  Whew! I think that might be about it.

If you’re interested, check out worrywart.jessicawicksnin.com.  If you’re really interested, check out my code on git hub (jwicksnin).

Second challenge:  A “Benjamin Speaks” app for Dad/every retirement-savvy person to aid them in financial decision making.  This took CSS to create a neat shadowed “quote bubble” and awesome jQuery to take a submitted question, find a suitable (random) answer in a text file, and output the random answer.  Nothing too fancy, but the image of a $100 bill that I gleaned from Google addressing my dad directly is really cute.

Third challenge: A “Facebook for Two” for my boyfriend/every couple who too busy actually having a relationship “IRL” to document every stage of their relationship on actual Facebook.  This took some serious JavaScript because a text file wasn’t good enough – I was determined to use the word AJAX as much as possible.  I ended up using a quick PHP file to write from JavaScript to the existing XML file on the server.  So now I feel very comfortable reading and writing XML files based on user input via AJAX requests.  It’s basically a poorly-styled Facebook, which made me question the value of Facebook at $100,000(?) a share if I can build the same thing in a couple weeks with nothing but Google and Web Programming Step by Step (thank you CSE at UW) for help.