Day 15-16: Self-teaching CS 1

Thursday and Friday of Week 2 of actual work at KWAT continued with tasks of previous days. I kept working on backing up the KWAT website, as it needed a lot of updates; Anthony worked on designing the main page for the website; Lisa worked more on ghU lesson plan; Ritika worked more on the brochure.

This brochure was requested by one of the senior members of KWAT for an annual event. Since we the GROW team are staying here for so long (2 months), she had asked me on Wednesday if we could work on the design of the brochure; she had said she would fill the contents. With one of the officers, I found appropriate images of individuals that should go on the brochure.

On the other hand, the version of the current website (Joomla ver 1.5) was ancient! More than five newer versions have been released since the ver 1.5, and even some of the update tools did not work on this antiquity. Although Anthony suggested that we should pay to get the website updated, I had another plan in mind: backing up the website on my laptop and updating the website in multiple steps. This might take more time, but it certainly had advantages: apart from preventing extra expenditure, we could monitor the steps and start over from our own backup if something went wrong. The problem was, nobody majored in computer sciences.

Grudgingly remembering the last year’s struggles with bioinformatics programs, I started reading the manual for update. I downloaded needed programs like Akeeba, xampp, and kickstart ( these might make my already-too-old PC even slower, but oh well ). Like everything in computers for non-programmers, these programs frequently crashed and ran into errors that even Google did not have an answer to. I faced a major problem when I tried to test my backup to see if it actually works: the installer (a program named kickstart) would not work at all! Partly given up, I focused on easier problems, such as making donation buttons on the main page of KWAT website.

On Friday, after hours of looking for a place with decent WiFi in vain, we continued our work in the guest house. Anthony made more candidates of the webpage design after an officer at KWAT wanted to have more options to choose from. Wanting to focus on the webpage backup, I asked Lisa to work on PayPal issues. Ritika continued to work on the brochure design; we hope to go over the draft of the design next week.

Unable to find any solutions or hints to this problem, I thought of an idea (more like a hypothesis?!): maybe the backup of the current website needs an older version of the installer. And the result? It worked ( facepalm to the current version ). Thus, the website back-up was complete, all ready for an update. My teammates also finished their week’s work: Anthony came up with three different designs of the main page, Ritika finished the draft of the design, and Lisa identified the documents that PayPal needed from KWAT.

All happy and satisfied, we all went to bed, dreaming of an exciting adventure of Chiang Rai that lay ahead…

– Hoon

P.S. I understand that the actual CS1 at Dartmouth does nothave anything to do with backing up the website, but you get the idea.