Unit 11 & looking back

I honestly wish I hadn’t struggled so much with FTP during this past unit so that I could concentrate more on the structure of PHP. I did do the standard lamp installation quite a while ago in unit 7, but I still wasn’t seeing the /var/www directory in fugu. Thus I typed everything out in the command line using sudo nano (this was actually quite fun, as the tags light up in the command line – they do in text edit/dreamweaver as well, but it’s not quite the same as in the command line you’re seeing it against a dark background – it was the only light I could see, so to speak, in my very gloomy confusion. But this is how we learn, right?

For the most part I feel pretty good about what I’ve learned, but I know it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t feel as though I can comprehensively articulate everything I’ve learned because it’s all yet swirling around me like a sea of numbers & words. I think there are many people in the class who are able to pick up this information much more quickly, so I’ve felt somewhat less skilled than in my previous two digin courses. With my 50-hour work weeks I’ve found the course load a bit daunting, but that’s the feeling I expect from a graduate program too – it’s not supposed to be easy.

I do agree with prof. Fulton that we should consider picking up certain programming languages, if even just one or two, in order to become proficient. Personally I really liked learning XML and Mysql: XML because of its flexibility and omnipresence in the current work of digital curation, and Mysql because I particularly enjoy its regular expressions and Boolean operators. It also goes hand in hand with this week’s PHP exercises.

I’m looking forward to immersing myself in my final project paper and wrapping up the course over the next 7 days (thank goodness for some furlough time this week!), and I must say that I will miss the rigor that this course has provided – I also appreciate that prof. Fulton has been so available to the class, emailing back seemingly 24/7 when students are struggling with the activities. Anyways, I think it’s time to end my blog as I just did a control + c on a word doc as I would on the VM! Time to go to sleep.