When I bought my domain and hosting space four and a half months ago, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. In fact, the only thing I did do was put up a place-holder page, which merely confirmed my enjoyment of unicorn blood. (It keeps me young and healthy, but at a very high cost.) Once the place-holder page was up, I wasn’t completely sure that I would actually replace it with anything else. But, here we are – my first official blog. (Believe it or not I had an opendiary.com account in late high school and early college, so I guess that was technically blogging.)
What is this?
I haven’t planned all of this out, so I don’t know what kind of consistency this site will have. What I do know is that I will be leaving for the Philippines in a little over a month, and I really wanted to blog about some of the things I experience, and maybe take a picture of two. So, I guess that’s something to look forward to. There is also an official Rotary District 5710 GSE Team blog, so there will probably be some cross-posting.
I do have a few plans for the site, most of which I wanted to get done before putting it up, but I guess I’ll start slow and build it up. Let’s break those down into short and long-term goals:
Short term
- Write something for the about page
- Put up a proper contact form
- Add the Flickr badge (I don’t actually have any photos in my Flickr account, which is the hold back)
- Populate the photos page
- Add a current reading section, aka books section
- Clean up the code a bit more (I blame some on WP and some on myself)
Long term
- Clean up the WP template pages
- Play with the Flickr API, which should provide more flexibility than the badge
- Play with the Readernaut API – this is what originally made me think of a books section
- Play with the Twitter API – the Twitter badge is sufficient for now
- Work on the design
- Make the comments section much better
- Anything else I think of
I really envy all you designers out there. I know I’m not a designer, but I do have a discerning eye for design, which means I know my “designs” look bad. Maybe I’ll have somebody *cough*Ben*cough* help me out, but I can live with this for now.
This site was built on a 960 grid (not quite the 960 grid system), and is pretty much straight text and color. I made a custom WordPress theme (using the word “theme” lightly.) I know the site doesn’t validate, don’t bother telling me – I’m not too concerned, but I’ll work on it. I also haven’t tested it too thoroughly, so I’m sure there are problems somewhere. I’m open to any suggestions, including WP plugins. I’ve honestly never used WordPress, it’s pretty slick.
I’d certainly like to add more functionality and enhance the appearance, but I really was running out of time before I leave. Actually, I got my plane ticket this week, so that was pretty motivating. On a side note, we have a layover in Tokyo and I’m pretty sad I won’t actually get to see the city.