Plans for the weekend

It should be known that while I don’t often publish a lot on this site, I think about it more frequently than I care to admit. At this very moment, I have 3 -almost finished- blog posts waiting in the draft section, and a notepad sheet filled with possible post subjects that I think people might find interesting. One of the dilemmas is that I find myself choosing subjects based on the comments or traffic I think it might earn me, rather than just blogging about it and have a written record of the thought. The same goes for my side projects. I’ll have intermittent bursts of energy and creativity, but largely the experiments and projects sit in the gritty grave that is my sandbox (dev.elihorne.com). Then it occurred to me: this is ridiculous. I’ve got nothing to prove, and nobody to prove it to. I’m a young geek, with a great job (that happens to take up a lot of my time), and a lot of interests that I’m constantly learning more about.

So on this bizarre Leap Day Friday, let me tell you what I’ve been up to, and what I have planned. A peek behind the curtain if you will.

A little while ago, I got really fixated on organizing my client folder because I started finding duplicate source files saved all of the place, and no good way of differentiating whether xx_final.pdf or xx_final_final.psd was what I should be referring to. I created a “new-client.zip” file which, when unpacked, presented me with a brand new folder containing the following structure:

• Documents - word docs, excel stuff, PDF’s, essential text assets
• Source Files - All my original creations, .PSD, .AI, .INDD
• Assets - Client supplied artwork, PSD’s, resources
• Misc - Where all the extra fluff and temporary rendered images go
• Skeletor - A bare bones theme for WordPress

If you’ve looked through my portfolio, you probably noticed that most of my stuff is built upon a WordPress framework. For a while, I would do a fresh install, and then start clearing out the markup and css from the default K2 theme. After a while, I got tired of doing that and decided to create my own barebones stylesheet. This would have all the naming convention I use most frequently, and the markup that I find most flexible. And so I made Skeletor in an afternoon. I included it in the zip, unpacked it into every new client folder, and used it twice. BUMMER.

It turned out that I had stripped the document down too far, something that is nice if you want a truly fresh start, but not if you are trying to develop quickly. What I was missing was all the great WP template tags, the really specific references to control comment styling, etc. I put this on my to-do list, where it sat for several months until I started preparing IKEA for public release. As I began to analyze my work, I realized that while I understood the structure of the design, it probably wasn’t very transparent to a new comer. I built the theme by the seat of my pants, adding new features and deleting others when I felt like it. As a result, there were styles included that had never seen the light of day.

So last weekend, I revisited Skeletor. I redubbed the first version “0.5″ and began the process to version “1.0″. My goal is to create a framework of sorts that is truly barebones in that it can accomodate any style or design, but at the same time, take out all of the leg work and heavy lifting required to make a WordPress theme really dynamic. This includes sidebar widgets, comment styling, “active links” from Pages and Category outputs, etc. This weekend I will do three things:

1. Release the Skeletor Framework
2. Release a generic theme showing the flexibility of Skeletor
3. Finally, release IKEA, build on top of Skeletor

Words will be Pressed this Weekend. Yea, I used to be a big Masters of the Universe fan. Wanna fight about it?

In other news, I picked up a new domain today that I will be using in conjunction with a twitter API experiment. I’ve got the concept documented, the name servers pointed, and the twitter account created. At some point between projects this weekend, I’m going to install CakePHP, and see if my server(s) can handle the brunt of my creativity. Or the crushing silence.

Oh yea, and I’m running a 5k race on Sunday. Wish me luck.