Basically, to do this assignment I used 3 different APIS, kind of. I'm using a random word api . Initially I wanted to make it more ascii related to keep with the theme I started last week because I think ascii art is kind of cool. I wanted to use this ascii art api but when trying to access the website using fetch, I get this error: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://artii.herokuapp.com/make?text=captionless. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).

I tried for a few hours to be able to get it to work because I'm stubborn but reading about CORS kind of went over my head. I think basically the website just doesn't allow permissions for web projects to access the website. I did found out that fetch takes a bunch of parameters and after playing with it I found out if I set fetch to not use cors I can access the website but not get any information from it... so not very helpful. Eventually I just went with a hacky approach and used an Iframe with the style hidden to display the word.

I also added definitions from a definition api to add more content. The experience I am trying to give the user is to be able to learn new words in an easy way. I am also experimenting with different website styles to figure out what I like and I'm trying to give it a more simplistic or minimalistic style. I had some difficult getting the ifile centered and displayed properly so it's kind of hacky and looks weird on smaller screens. Also here is some images with the definition as I didn't upload the api key.

The readings this week are interesting, and I actually find it cool to learn about infastructure. I liked the Oliver reading more because of the way it is written but hearing about issues at an actual center is interesting as well as I would have never thought that could be an actual problem. The internet seems kind of magic but as I learn more about it, it starts to make more sense. However at the same time the more I learn about server stuff and I guess programming in general I realize how little I actually know about it. Kind of keeps you honest I guess, there's so much to learn. Whenever I am in class I feel like I have a good grasp of the material but the second I start looking at other people's code or see different solutions to a problem I feel like I know almost nothing. Anyway, I'm kind of rambling now but I figured I'd tell you a bit about where my head is at.