So I know I’ve been less than good about getting my new site all cleaned up. Upon thinking about the work I’ve been doing this past week, I realized that I’ve paid no attention to the site, which is fair to neither me nor you. So upon some reflection, I’ve drawn up a little to-do list. I plan on starting on it this weekend and slowly chipping at it until it is no more. So, in descending order of priority…
- Add menu bar to top of pages. This one is important for multiple reasons. First, I intend on having some other pages up here besides blog pages (actually, there are a couple of other pages up that you, my loyal blog readers [all N of you where N is a very small integral number greater than zero], probably haven’t found), and I need the menu there first so they can be accessed. Also, it’s to make my life a little easier for the next item.
- Trash the absolute positioning layout. This is mostly a backend thing, so it won’t really yield noticeable changes on the frontend. However, it will make my job of adding/maintaining content on this site much easier.
- Fix the incorrectly styled areas of my site. I never completely adapted my CSS style over to all the dynamically generated WordPress XHTML. So I need to finish that up.
- Fix some CSS hacks with better styling. This is the spit-and-polish step of my work. This will fix the minutae that annoy me. With the completion of this step, I should be as pixel-perfect as I wish to be.
- Restyle search box. It came with WordPress, and I’m sure it’s useful. But, I must say, it’s damn ugly. So I’m going to make it one with my website.
- Write up some new content. I want to add a projects section, pictures section (see next item), links section. There are also a few other things I may decide to add.
- Brew up some custom PHP scripts. I want to write some PHP/MySQL code for dealing with some things that I shouldn’t have to update manually. For example, my book list should be dynamic and a custom script would fit the bill pretty well (that is, until a project of Sharon’s and mine comes to fruition). Also, I’d like to set up a picture database as well.
Eventually, I want do a little face lift work to the site. The basic style hasn’t really changed since June 2004, I believe, and there are a few design elements I’d like to change. This was spurred on from whipping together a page for Session History Extension, the style for which took two hours to whip up from scratch. I like some of the design elements and cues I implemented. And, I just recently started thinking up some ideas for a complete stylistic overhaul of my website. But that’s a version and a half away, which, in the software development world, is a long time from now.
As a quick aside, I haven’t been posting as much about my goings-on as I’d like to recently, mostly because there hasn’t been much going on. I’m still jobless and still looking. Right now, I’m spending my days in front of the computer screen, working on projects, paid and otherwise, while listening to CNBC or Star Trek: TNG in the background. There isn’t much else going on right now outside my daily routine. I think I’m even starting to get in a bit of rut, which I’d like to get out of as soon as possible.