I was working on making a navbar using CSS today and had a mix of wins and fails. While it was frustrating to not accomplish all that I set out to do, today was a good reminder that failure is a sign that I’m working on new things and that learning to deal with these setbacks is an important skill, since I’ll be encountering them frequently along the way.
One win and a couple fails from today:
Win
- When I left off working on the navbar the last time I was trying to add a FontAwesome icon and was missing the stylesheet link. The FontAwesome docs didn’t make it clear to me where to get a link if a project doesn’t have it installed locally. I eventually learned about how one can getting links to web resources using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), found a link to FontAwesome icon resources on cdnjs.com, and added this link to my project’s HTML file, getting access to the icon.
Fails
- I wanted to get the search icon to float on the right hand side of the navbar while the other items stayed aligned left. I wasn’t able to get this to work, despite trying a bunch of things and trying to apply what I’d learned about creating floating elements from the demo.
- When I didn’t have success making the floating item in the navbar I tried to at least get a photo to float in the body area. I didn’t succeed in this either. For some reason creating floating items completely eluded me.
- I was quite disappointed by this time, having failed at a couple of tasks. Wanting to have at least one more win for the day, I attempted to change the font size of the footnote reference to the lorem ipsum generator. I thought this would be straightforward - create a div for the footnote and specify a style for that div with the desired font size. For some reason I couldn’t get this to work, either. I knew at this point it was time to call it a day and come back to CSS another day…
While I had wanted to increase the height of the navbar and get it to touch the sides of the screen, I didn’t get to work on these two items as I ran out of time.
For today, I found that the best way to move forward was to celebrate the wins - no matter how small - and remind myself that I’ll have opportunities in the future to pick up on those skills I didn’t get today.