What it is:

Uranium Cat1 is a new github repository2 and project made by me.

It is a chat website made to bypass the URL filters on school wifi. My school has a very strict phone policy this year, and has disabled even Slack due to students using it in class to talk to friends. So, I decided to use this as an oppurtunity for a coding project and make a chat site.

It is still a work in progress. So far I have used HTML and CSS to build it, but I plan on using PHP, Javascript, and Bootstrap as I learn/experiment.

Progress so far:

I’ve:

  • Launched github pages for it
  • Created basic html foramt and css styles
  • Furnished with a title, body, and footer with the link to the github repository.
  • Given it a modern looking makeover
  • Built the base for the “chat” box
  • Researched best languages/methods for creating chat sites (PHP, Javascript, looked into whether or not python is an option).

What I need to do next:

Make the chat website into an actual chat website:

  • Figure out whether I am going to use PHP or Javascript, and continue researching python alternatives.
  • Creating host/client connections, disconnecting
  • Write/send messages
  • Send button
  • Users can choose/enter names
  • ‘Exit’ button
  • CSS styling for things like names of different users.

Long term ideas:

  • Keywords for custom ascii symbols (☏, ♫, ♥, ☺ , ☹ , ❇ , ★) (I love these)
  • Users can enter a hexadecimal value to choose what color they want their name to be
  • Implement security features to prevent unwanted people from joining chats (ie internet trolls, people looking to collect information)
  • Support for sending files and images.

…. And so on…

Why I keep making html websites from scratch + history of these types of projects:

From time to time I review HTML/CSS by making a basic website from scratch, but with a different focus every time. The first time, it was Watermelon Blog 2.0, a remake of this website from scratch, later repurposed for an unfinished browser game project. I considered repurposing the code for Watermelon Blog 2.0 for Uranium Cat, but I felt that the code had been repurposed and mutilated enough.

My aim in every programming project / repository of mine is to be able to explain what the significance and function of each line is.

It is deeply frustrating when there is a line of code that is absolutely essential to my project (ie everything breaks without that one line, especially certain css structure stylings), but I cannot explain what exactly it does. Ultimately, I want to prevent that. After all, if I’m in a job interview, what am I to do when I present a project and the recruiter asks a question about the code I can’t answer?

Additionally, I don’t feel that a project is truly my own work, unless I truly made it myself, not some copy paste soup or a step by step reproduction of a tutorial.

Conflict with tutorials and why Uranium Cat is so important:

Speaking of tutorials, I generally have a hard time with them. Its not because I can’t follow them step by step, I can, but when I do, I don’t feel like I learned anything. Tutorials make the process exponentially easier, but it becomes too easy. I’ve learned to teach myself using many different resources on the internet, and piecing things together rather than relying on a single source, no matter how good, to provide everything I need. this, along with wanting to feel like I own my work, are the main issues I have with tutorials. But perhaps there is a better way, a proper method to learning from tutorials. That is what I aim to find discover for myself with Uranium Cat.

Progress images:

First launch:

Featured a pastel orange heading and footer, with a light navy background. Unfortunately, I no longer have a record of what it looked like. It looked like an old website.

Sleek and modern redesign:

Redesign

Chat boxes added and UI design (stage one):

Chat box