Grammar Captive

An artist could spend his entire life painting one picture and die in poverty with little or no feedback about what he had actually accomplished.  Or, he can paint many pictures, share each with the world, and earn a living doing what he loves most — paint.  In effect, a successful artist knows when to stop and move on to his next painting.

And, so it is with Grammar Captive.  We are nearing the end of our second major painting and have begun the integration of the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast page with the Grammar Captive main page.

Now, when you open to the main page, and click on the phrase Weekly Podcasts in the navigation bar, not only do you open to a brief description of the most recently produced podcast, but also to a link that takes you to the same, but more elaborated podcast on the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast host page.  There you need only Click and Listen for a second time and the podcast is yours!

After a little more refurbishing of the podcast insert on the main page, the integration of Grammar Captive podcasts and the Seven Gates newsletter will begin.  Indeed, we are much closer to real podcast production than we have ever been before!  I am very excited.

Roddy

The additional eye-candy that holds the interest of users and pulls them ever closer to the substantive content of a webpage is now in place.

Try any of the avenues of approach listed in the last entry and click on either Click and Listen or Discover more … whichever is suitable given the user’s approach.  Hidden content now become visible and visible content can be easily hidden at the user’s will.  These function are especially useful to users who visit the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast webpage via a smart-phone.

By next week, it is expected that the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast webpage will be fully integrated into the Grammar Captive website.

Handwork and patience are becoming increasingly manifest.  Have a great weekend!

Roddy

We are nearing the point where the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast development page will be integrated into the Grammar Captive website as a completed functional component.  Recent major upgrades include:

1. Installation of jPlayer — the jQuery widget with which users will be able to download and listen to Grammar Captive podcasts while on the Grammar Captive webpage.  For the moment you can only download music.  Try it, anyway!
2. Installation of jsSocials — the jQuery widget with which users will be able to share easily Grammar Captive podcasts with their friends.
3. Users can now access the same podcast from four different avenues of approach:
   1. A third-party podcast host page selected by Grammar Captive — e.g., iTunes, Stitcher, Libsyn, etc.
   2. Via a friend’s entry into the user’s mailbox or shared social media account.
   3. Under the Chronology subheading of the navigation bar that will include all podcasts ever produced by Grammar Captive.
   4. Under any of the direct selection options offered under the subheadings Concept, Form and Use, and Technique.
4. And, all of the underlying PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML, and CSS structure and mechanics required to make these two widgets and several avenues of approach work smoothly within the Grammar Captive framework.

What is left is additional formatting and the direct selection of something other than a proxy podcast.

Simply do not forget to click wherever it says Click and Listen and make sure that you send a link to a friend!

It has been another great week at Grammar Captive!  I surely hope that yours has been equally productive.

Roddy

Or, better late than never.

Pull up any podcast from any point of navigation and discover the related podcasts.

• A third party podcast host page (Proxy Link)
• A podcast found in one of the following lists in the navigation bar:  Technique (Linear Analysis, Clausal Analysis, Socratic Inversion) or Chronology.
• A podcast discovered under the Concept or Form and Use subheadings in the navigation bar.

The formatting is not yet complete, and still there is no real data, but the technology is now in place — the fruit of two and one half additional weeks of study and experimentation with the grammar of MySQL.

Roddy

The Click and Listen pages, although still not complete, are now available in the Concept and Form and Use sections of the navigation bar.  For a sample display perform the following steps:

Step One:  Click on Grammar Captive Weekly Podcasts.
Step Two:  In the navigation bar find the phrase Form and Use, and click on it.
Step Three:  Find the phrase Podcast Index, and click on it.
Step Four: Hover over the section called Nouns and Noun Phrases, and click on the subtitle The Noun and Its Uses.  Where before the subheading disappeared, a Click and Listen page now appears.

Early this week the missing information regarding each podcast’s referenced podcasts will appear on all Click and Listen pages.  The referenced podcasts are important insofar as they will give listeners the ready opportunity to listen to other podcasts closely related to the one they just heard.

Roddy

What is cool about working with others who speak the same language as you is the relative ease with which highly useful knowledge can be exchanged.

In a casual introduction with one of my new office neighbors I discovered a relatively simple fix to a seemingly impossible problem — specifically the inclusion of a meta tag that tells the browser window to adjust  to the size of the user’s view port.

Using this tag along with several minor adjustments to accommodate its effect  has left the ever developing Weekly Podcast webpage with an amazingly functional responsive design with little loss of aesthetics.

Mind you, this is not the promised visible outcome that I still hope to achieve by the end of this week.  It just sort of happened along the way.

Roddy

 

In order to realize the Grammar Captive Weekly Podcast webpage four data tables are required.  These tables provide information not only for the RSS feeds and Weekly Podcast host page, but also the Seven Gates newsletter.  Important is that all tables act in unison and on user and developer command. These commands include the handling of new podcast information, the updating of old podcast information, the cross-referencing of all podcast information, and when necessary even podcast deletion.

Hopefully by the end of this week there will be something both visible and highly useful.

Roddy

The Galvanize motto, the physical home of Grammar Captive for the past two months, is “Learn, Work, Grow”.  Maybe it is a take-off on Justin Bieber’s “Bigger, Better, Stronger”.  Or, maybe it is just the magic of the number three!  Who knows?  In any case, I display the Galvanize motto proudly on the back of my hooded pull-over wherever I go.

This week was primarily about learning, as the MySQL JOIN and UNION statements, although simple in and of themselves, quickly become more complex when you try to combine them with AS, WHERE, and IN statements.  In any case, it has been an eye-opening week into the depths of the grammar of MySQL, and I am finishing this week off with an overall of the column definitions of my podcasts’ two primary data tables.

Special thanks, this week, to W3Schools forums and my colleagues at Galvanize-Seattle.  This up-coming week should result in a very nice surprise.

Roddy

Still another step closer to the preliminary consummation of the Grammar Captive Podcast Hostpage.

Although still in a primitive stage the technique for selecting one podcast, but retrieving information for the selected podcast and closely related other podcasts with a single click is now possible.

Still one “grammatical step” closer to launch.

Roddy

 

I nearly forgot!

Grammar Captive is now accessible over a secure network.  This means that you can now type https://www.grammarcaptive.com rather than http://www.grammarcaptive.com and still access the same website, but with secure access to every page — not just those for which your private information is requested.

It costs Grammar Captive just a little more, but I am just as afraid of government and thieves as you.  By the way, the number of users using the https protocol has tripled since it was first introduced three months ago.

Roddy