Frontend Mentor - Advice generator app solution

This is a solution to the Advice generator app challenge on Frontend Mentor. Frontend Mentor challenges help you improve your coding skills by building realistic projects.

Table of contents

• Overview
  • The challenge
  • Screenshot
  • Links
• My process
  • Built with
  • What I learned
  • Useful resources
• Author

Overview

The challenge

Users should be able to:

• View the optimal layout for the app depending on their device's screen size
• See hover states for all interactive elements on the page
• Generate a new piece of advice by clicking the dice icon

Screenshot

Links

• Solution URL: Hosted on github pages

My process

Built with

• Semantic HTML5 markup
• CSS
• JavaScript

What I learned

It was fun incorporating JavaScript into my project. Initially, I was testing out my site in firefox, where the advice would not reset and randomise due to the .fetch() command accessing the cache. To combat this, i changed some of the optional settings for the command:

function get(url) {
  /* optional settings have to be passed in as an object, I only chose to change how the fetch command accesses the cache - so only that setting is mentioned in the object */
  return fetch(url, {cache: 'no-store'}).then((resp)=>resp.json());
}

Working with the fetch API was a great learning experience which I hope will allow me to use other 3rd party APIs in the future.

I also encountered some issues with using document.querySelector() since it would always return null when used in the script and the result i wanted in the dev console. I later discovered that this was due to the script loading before the html - meaning that the querySelector() wouldn't have found anything. To combat this, I only used the querySelector() once the site had loaded.

function onLoad() {
    // run after the html loads
    adviceNum = document.querySelector('#advice-number');
    adviceContent = document.querySelector('#advice-text');

    // so that there is already a piece of advice there
    generateAdvice();
}

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", onLoad);

Useful resources

• W3schools - Helped me with styling certain elements
• MDN web docs - Helped me a lot with the fetch API and a great general reference

Author

• Frontend Mentor - @SushiOnToast
• CodePen - @SushiOnToast
• CodeWars - @SushiOnToast