Lagging Behind

I've been lagging behind on my blog posts. And for my February project. I'm about a post behind and I'm not really any closer than I was at the beginning of this vacation to having a redesigned personal site.

At this point, I'm throwing in the towel on my February project. I'd like to think I made a decent effort this week to get it done, but it's just not inspiring.

With downchrisdown.com, I had a really ambitious design plan. I wanted it to look like a desktop. I also wanted it to be skinnable so that with a click you could change it from looking like OS X, to looking like Windows (Win XP, at the time), to looking like Linux. I wanted it to be a css-only change, because that seemed like a cool technical challenge.

I also wanted the site to be a main aggregation of everything on the internet that is me. my blog posts, my tweets, everything. Lots of gathering dynamic content and displaying them on my main site. I had to learn APIs and it was pretty fun & challenging.

chrisdownie.net was to be substantially less ambitious. A minimalist site to host all of my created content that wasn't dynamically updated. Then it would just have links to all the various sites where I generate content. It was to be mobile-friendly. But that's all I really had in mind.

As a result, it's noting noteworthy. Nothing inspiring. It was just me doing what essentially amounted to a bunch of work to get something done. And without any real motivation other than my own wish to have it done, there's no real reward in doing it.

That said, the failure was worth the effort. I've got a pretty good grasp on how to use Node.js (which, in retrospect, was complete overkill for what I wanted to build. But I wanted to learn Node.js, so I did.) and I've been reading up on MongoDB. I'm really excited about what these technologies will enable me to do.

I'm going to build something today. It won't be what I thought I was building this month, but it'll be something fun that I've been meaning to do.