David Seah / SOC
Process Journal: Stream-of-Consciousness Notes

As I slowly woke from a deep slumber, I idly ticked through a list of possible things to do. All of them, worthwhile! All of them, just a little too much to get excited about. It’s a long-standing pattern, this, and I’ve at various times ascribed it to:

• a lack of intrinsic motivation
• a lack of external feedback
• a missing sense of mission or calling
• depression at the amount of work required
• Seasonal Affective Disorder
• being “interesting” rather than “exciting”
• not knowing where to start
• not immediately knowing how to make it work
• lack of energy / sleepiness
• lack of water / nutrition
• back workspace
• other projects sapping energy from me

Today, though, I think I can wrap these all up under one malady, which I’m dubbing “Low Threshold of Inconvenience” or LTI. I have a remedy for almost all of the things I’ve listed above, but every one requires some effort on my part. When I’m feeling good or am “feeling the moment”, I can deploy any number of countermeasures and get through something. When I’m not, however, it’s tough. My basic proclivity, when I’m by myself in the comfort of my own home, is to avoid things that are inconvenient to start, unless the result is quite salient. Preparing food falls in that category.

When the productive choices in front of me are all inconvenient, then the non-productive pre-packaged choices are easy to fall into. Watching TV. Playing a video game. Driving somewhere to do some window shopping. Surfing the net. These are all rewarding with new ideas and inputs without having to do anything other than click a button or get into the car. It’s a noxious habit to fall into, especially if you’re desire is to build something new for yourself.

I was thinking about my particular level of LTI. The following things are inconvenient for me to the point I will not do them unless I am in the mood to push, or are being pushed:

• Opening more than one window on my computer.
• Looking for a file in a directory.
• Having to remember anything.
• Starting to design.
• Writing a program.
• Coding a website.
• Reading what I have already written.
• Doing a second draft.
• Drafting a report from multiple sources.
• Picking up something on the floor.
• Going to the mailbox, because I have to get out of my car and carry it back.
• Doing the dishes.
• Exploring a new town.
• Taking out the trash.
• Dusting.

The top of the list are things that are more work related, while the bottom of the list are more like chores. The list is pretty embarrassing…it seems that I find EVERYTHING inconvenient. I have no inherent desire to go out and do these things. The only thing that keeps it from becoming a desperate pattern is that that I like good stuff. And I’ve found that I can create good stuff, when I apply myself. And the ability to make good stuff is the gateway to being able to buy more good stuff, as well as create some stature for myself. In other words, I value good stuff. That desire to have good stuff means I either have to create it, make the money to buy it. The resistance is that I don’t particularly like the process because it’s (wait for it) NOT usually a good process. Every interaction pains me because it’s in some way not optimal or good. This drives me nuts.

For example, starting to write a program means that I need to have a collection of skills and software programs, with the ability to apply them intelligently. The skills are not difficult, once you find them and understand them. Most of the educational material out there is piecemeal, just fragments of the big picture, and lacking the organization to make the material truly accessible. That offends me on a basic level. The software programs themselves are often obtuse and poorly documented, and sometimes are shoddily coded or conceived. I find offense in that also. It fills me with such frustration that I often feel like giving up. I feel limited by factors that are beyond my control.

This is probably why I’m such a poor student, because I’m such a judgmental deconstructor of everything from presentation to accuracy to communication style. I used to be confused by bad material, thinking that I was stupid. Then, realizing it wasn’t me, I took it personally. These days I’m more relaxed about it and can go with the flow to privately construct my own understanding, but the frustration is still there. The making of things can be easy and obvious, I keep dreaming, if only the material was cleanly presented and explorable.

For stuff I know how to do, like design a page or make a webpage, there are many small inconveniences. I hate looking for files on my computer, remembering where I put them. My project filing system is fairly efficient, but it’s still a pain in the butt. I don’t like opening explorer folders, finding where the window pops up, and drilling down into a directory structure. It’s all so awful, the user interfaces. I’d write my own file manager if I knew how, but then I’m back to the problem of dealing with all that bad documentation to learn how, which doesn’t help me. What kills me is that I know I can do it; it’s just that there’s so much crud to wade through. But I digress…the next step to making something is managing all the thousands of bits of code and the dozens if not hundreds of graphic assets, each one a tiny gnat-bite of inconvenience. Compounding this are all the unknowns that have to be resolved, and the result may NOT be good.

For other chores like picking stuff off the floor, the frustration is a little different. First, I never see stuff like that unless there’s a reason to be concerned (like, someone ELSE might see it). And then, when I really look, I really don’t like what I see. I hate my kitchen floor, for example, but am too cheap and too judgmental about contractors (and even a too much out of my element) to take a chance and try to fix it with real effort and money. It’s a big project, in my mind, to get this done right. So I just seethe quietly inside, and don’t do it. If it really capture my attention, I will do something and spend a few hours on it, but it’s rare.

For less epic chores, like cleaning the cat box or doing the dishes, I’ve learned to just shut my mind off and do it without commentary. In fact, when I’ve done this, I end up coming up with ways of handling it more efficiently and with less stress. This is the “on-the-fly systemization of process” that I tend to do when locked into a task that I’ve given my promise to complete.

This isn’t quite where I thought this post would go, but I’ll sum up the takeaways for me:

• I am highly sensitive to inconvenience. Almost every worthwhile thing I can think to do seems inconvenient, and therefore I don’t do them.
• I am highly judgmental of the tools and references I use to do things, which creates another barrier to using them to do things.
• I tend to be offended by bad stuff, and am easily irritated by chores that are not in themselves a contributor to excellence.
• In other words, I take a lot of process very personally, and not in a good way.

Realizing this, I think the following realizations are helpful:

• Relax, don’t take inconvenience/mediocrity personally, and know that my first pass through will systemize it so it’s better next time. This happens automatically for me.
• Having the willpower to push past inconvenience is kind of MY HERO MOMENT. Immediacy and external factors can also provide an assist, but when it comes to my OWN SELF IMPROVEMENT, the willpower is necessary. It’s my own journey.

By not dwelling on the inconvenience, and focusing on the systemization pass, I may be able to push few a few more projects. In a way it’s a distraction from the actual task, but I think for someone like me it’s probably necessary. I loathe inconvenience and inefficiency, and have to deal with it eventually. It’s probably my greatest challenge!

The past few days I have felt lost. Overwhelmed, maybe, is the better term. I am overwhelmed with choice. I also have to face that the amount of time and effort it will take to build a financially-sound product business is unpredictably wrong, so I have to shift more energy back to doing for-hire design work. Striking the right balance, here, will be important.

I don’t know why this is so important to me…partly it might be because I want to understand how business people think. They think differently than missionaries, designers, and employees of any color collar. They have a different set of preconceptions and assumptions, and a different playbook. The biggest barrier to me understanding them is probably my own preconceptions and values, shaped as they are to the trades I’ve been and the subcultures I inhabit. As a broad example, the ideas of value and fairness get in the way of pricing profitably.

Say I design a nifty chart. I can print it on nice paper at home, and it will cost me maybe 25 cents per sheet when factoring in ink cost and paper cost. I’m ignoring other costs, like the cost of the printer, electricity, and a space with a roof over it. If I consider just the cost of the paper, the mind of the consumer would say, “Hey, you can sell that for a dollar” which seems fine. A 300% markup over the base cost of 25 cents! And a dollar is quite affordable. However, there are also consumer perceptions of value based on price. What could possibly be good that costs only $1?

I’m facing this problem with the marketing of the Gun Safety Poster I had printed. On the one hand, the cost of production was fairly low. I’m finding I have to consider factors such as perception of value relative to the use. For example, is it something to keep, or something disposable? There are probably a dozen such decisions to make, and this has killed my momentum and I haven’t wanted to face it.

Why not face it? Any number of reasons. This week I’m planning on keeping a “attitude journal” to see how it goes.

I went to sleep later than usual (or rather, desired) and tried to wake up on 7 hours of sleep. Was difficult. Much resistance. I analyzed the feeling of not wanting to get up:

• Was I physically tired? Not really
• Was I mentally tired? Maybe. My mind was quite scattered, and flitted from thought to thought. Half dreaming, half free-associating. Hard to hold onto anything.
• Was I just being lazy? It seemed possible. I didn’t want to get up. I had a couple of hours until I truly HAD to get up, but there were things I should do.
• What were the physical sensations? Other than wanting to keep my eyes closed, and wanting to drift off back to sleep, there was a kind of pressure keep my eyes closed and to let consciousness slip away. It seemed centered behind the eyes, and maybe an inch upwards from center.

• Was I going to get up? I didn’t know, and I didn’t particularly care. But the responsible part of me wanted to get out of bed. I was just kind of mad about not wanting to do it. There was definitely some resistance.

  Continue reading →

An interim status update:

THURSDAY

I tried to stay up to watch the final shuttle landing, but fell asleep and woke up late. BUT, I executed on at least a few of the habits I think are successful for a good self-starting day:

• Turned off brain, focused on motion to the shower
• Cooked breakfast (or rather, lunch)
• Didn’t look at the computer before starting bill sorting task

On the other hand, while eating I did check my mail and fell down a Star Trek Online rabbithole:

They have just added a new location, Starfleet Academy, and I had to go check it out. It’s nice to see the developers add content piece-by-piece.

THURSDAY NIGHT

Thursday I went to sleep late again. What is keeping me up so late? I think it is a mixture of wanting to see something happen; if it’s not my own work I’m doing, then it’s investigating questions I have about making things. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking up structural pipe components, offroad excursion vehicles, house building and plans, semi-automatic rifle accessory manufacturing, and e-commerce solutions. I’ve also been reading about interesting people who have done interesting things; a lot of this is being logged on my pinterest boards. I think I can label all this activity as excitement-seeking behavior. Apparently, some part of me strongly believes that I need a minimum level of excitement in the form of new ideas / possibilities for me to think it was a good day. The problem, perhaps, is that it is much easier to consume other people’s excitement than it is to generate my own, particularly when this excitement is so readily-available in professionally-packaged for via the Internet. That’s conditioned consumer laziness at work!

Since I want to be more productive, the first thought I have is, “how can I make my own work be more exciting?”

• A lot of what I’ve been working on, in terms of productivity thinking, has been around making feedback more visible through the PCEO forms. However, this requires a measure of discipline, and it also requires external validation; if I make something and release it, I need to see some kind of response for me to derive a sense of satisfaction from it.

• The external validation could come from a team of people that I’m working with, but currently I do not have this team. I do have friends that encourage me, but there is a tendency for us to drift back into our own worlds. Maintaining virtual community is tough without an anchoring point.

• I could try to retrain my mind into thinking that my own work is of course more exciting, but then I would have to balance that impulse with client work. They are BOTH important. I have been somewhat successful at this.

• I could accept that the amount of work that I actually do is, for all intents and purposes, what it is. In other words: let go of this feeling of “I’m not doing enough”, and accept all the “non-productive” time as overhead implicit in the way that I am. Almost nothing in the world is 100% efficient. A really great internal combustion engine is nowhere near 100% efficient in converting fuel to energy.

None of these thoughts are very satisfying.

It’s been over 24 hours since I’ve written anything down about what I’m doing, and it’s probably not surprising that I feel like I’ve gone a little bit off the rails. So here I am back in the SOC.

Let me try to sum up my mood: feeling like I have to do some neglected chores. While the past two days were actually quite productive in terms of infrastructure tweaking on both davidseah.com and nonazon.com. Let me recap the major changes in the past week, because I have already forgotten them:

• Converted main websites to Multisite, and consolidated several smaller blogs into the main blog. This is a big deal.
• Moved web development to source control on both Mac and PC, so I can now keep track of fixes to the themes. This is a big deal.
• Soft-launched Nonazon.com Websites, and realized that there’s quite a bit of valuable experience I’ve accumulated over the past two years of trying to make it work. This is a big deal.
• Added a few new feature to the basic CXTINY template for the Nonazon.com Websites, converting a few older client projects to the new format.
• Added a lot more sub blogs to davidseah.com.
• Did theme updates, added custom features for both SeahTwentyTen and CleanrAgenceum to help integrate the sub blogs with the main blog.

I look at this list and think that it actually is quite a lot of work, and I even enjoyed it. The feeling I have now is that I have a stronger technology base to build on, and it’s very exciting. However, it seems like I am now craving new inputs, and with this is feeling that the other shoe is about to drop. I’m an optimistic worrier, apparently.

On Tuesday, most of the daytime was taken with a visit to the Massachusetts North Shore for my monthly haircut and a visit with an old high school buddy who lives there, so that was a needed boost of personal energy. It feels like it’s time to do another dive into the project list, and I find I’m loathe to do it.

Habit Review

In times like this, it’s important for me to get out of the house as soon as I wake up. However, since I went to sleep at 6AM last night and tried to wake up at 10AM, I was working at an energy deficit and it wasn’t until 730PM (!) that I got to Starbucks. I also have just realized I haven’t had anything to eat all day, so preoccupied I had been earlier with catching up with emails and Internet news. Not my finest day. However, I think there are a couple of reinforcing lessons I have learned:

• Sleep. Can’t cheat it. It starts the night before by shutting off at a decent time…NOT 6AM.
• Food. Can’t skip it. Same with water.
• Getting out of the house first thing, avoiding email and computer. Necessary. If I check the Internet at home before being in a purposeful environment, even if it’s a coffee shop, then it’s too easy to fall into the lazy surfing habit.

And there’s also the facing I need to do with the less-than-inspiring task list I have in front of me:

• Bills
• Cleaning the Kitchen
• Doing the Laundry

And then on top of it all is the work, both for clients and myself. This is the interesting stuff to me, and I tend to prioritize it over everything else.

Assessing Time Requirements

There’s a MISSING factor, though: the downtime spent cooking, eating, web surfing, and feeding the brain. There is a certain minimum amount of this I seem to need every day, and while I wish it wasn’t so it seems to be at least 4 to 6 hours. Let’s say it’s 6 hours (!), then add at least 8 hours of sleep. That’s 14 hours, leaving 10 hours for everything else.

But something isn’t adding up. There’s no way I spend 10 hours a day grinding at the desk working. Focused work time seems to average, based on a review of some recent time sheets, around 4 hours a day, with some days going very long (up to 12 hours, which is rarer). Some of the time appears to go to “unfocused work time”, which I would describe email distractions, checking stats on the website, and impromptu investigation into tangentially useful topics. But I really don’t know for sure. For the next few days I should bust out an Emergent Task Timer form and see where the time is going. There’s a continuum, I think, between the mindless Dave recharge time, the semi-useful research, and the revenue/empire building activities. Figuring out what is going into this continuum, and why, would be good to know for purposes of “life balance”.

In the meantime…

Let me review my calendar, wunderlist, and basecamp. This is something I’m avoiding because I really just want to go home and eat something, but I find that leaving a short next steps list is helpful in carrying momentum and continuity to the next day.

• Grocery Shopping – 30 min
• Bills – 15 minutes
• Handle Chores – 15 minutes
• First pass process on Logotype – 15 minutes

It doesn’t look like a lot of time I’m allocating, but I think this might actually be more productive than I think. I’ll finish this entry later.

Timestamp: 830PM

Questions I want to answer:

• How much slush is there in my day? What is causing it?
• How do I overcome the feeling that there’s too much to do?
• How do I keep to my sleeping habits? I stay up late in an attempt to get more done before squeezing my eyes shut.
• How to I manage context switching for daily tasks and long-term tasks? How do I track continuity on progress without a lot of fuss? It would be great if it felt as solid as the source control system that’s in place now, which is very satisfying.

I got to sleep late last night, as I kept making little tweaks to things. I got Subversion working with Coda, the editor I’ve been trying out on the Macintosh side of my computing environment, and it’s great! I did a few fixes to the website, and committed these changes to the repository. FELT GOOD. DAMN GOOD.

This morning I woke up and found myself wondering: NOW WHAT? So it’s interesting that I can get what felt like a lot of important work done, and still feel kind of anxious about it. For once, I decided to just push that thought out of my mind.

Still, I recognized that I needed to gather my thoughts and regroup. As I made my way downstairs, I noted for the first time the disaster my house had become in my work frenzy: cat hair balls growing on the carpet like mushrooms after a spring rain, piles of unopened mail, an unseemly pile of crumbs on the dining room table. In fact, the only part of the house that seemed presentable was a 4 sq-foot area in from of my monitor. I hadn’t looked at the rest of the house at all, and this lack of attention was showing quite plainly. I had managed to unlock a whole new level of bachelor sloth.

Anyway, I had written down a “get my head clear” recipe a couple weeks ago:

• Scan the Google Calendar
• Scan my Project Basecamp
• Scan my Emails
• Scan my Wunderlist

In about 15 minutes, I got a sense of where things were, and what I needed to take care of. This week, there’s a big development push I want to make on another client’s work. Also, I have to push out at least one “money making activity” idea, which is probably going to be a poster based on this post. I may also want to look at some development topics, but for balance I think I need to work with something physical instead of looking at more code.

A second ritual that I have been focusing on these days is getting out of the house first thing. If I linger by the computer, productivity sinks. There’s something about my Starbucks location that makes me want to work…probably it’s the hustle and bustle. While I’m at SBUX, I review the calendar and so forth, and then draw out a version of the Emergent Task Planner in my notebook. Today I wrote this at the top of the page:

The mood of the day…slightly concerned. I was expecting some kind of reward , but none is forthcoming even after he big push. The desire for a reward is strong! However…I can train myself out of this. I feel strangly SAD and TENSE about this, for some reason

A third ritual is to face the feeling and identify it. I feel sad and tense, but why? If I can name it, that gives me power over it.

• I think I feel let down that more exciting things didn’t happen after putting a lot of work in this weekend. Maybe I want someone to tell me I did a good job, or to know that it mattered. How would I feel if I did receive this kind of attention? Actually, I would feel a little embarrassed or self-conscious.
• Maybe I want the recognition that I worked hard and am therefore a person that deserves some kind of respect. There’s probably a little bit of that.
• I think the overall pattern is that I want some AFFIRMATION of WORTH. However, I already know that I did something that is going to help me in the long run; I don’t need affirmation in this. It would be nice if someone else cared about it, but it’s not necessary. I already have plenty of support.

The upshot: I’m fine, let’s move on. I am noting, though, that there is a desire to connect with other people who are doing similar things, the desire to have comrades or brothers- and sisters-in-arms. But that’s why this Stream of Conscioiusness blog exists…I’m sending the signal out there, and seeing what bounces back.

So I think I’m OK. With that clarified, it’s time to do some work.

I awoke with a brainstorm: I could use the simple template I’d made the “Cheap Websites II” project for the project itself. So I spent a couple hours tweaking it…eating my own dogfood, huzzah! While I was working with it, I also tweaked a few bugs that I wasn’t aware of, which never would have happened unless a user had brought it to my attention. I also am figuring out ways around CXTINY’s (the template) limited space, which will come in handy when handling user inquiries.

I had a second brainstorm too: that I really like analyzing things. If anything, I needed to add an “investigative design” section to the website. So I added one. And with this waking thought, I had the idea of modifying the version of “Cleanr” theme I’ve been hacking for the subsites to have an extended blog description, using code from CXTINY I’d written before. I haven’t gotten to that yet, but tonight before I hit the sack.

While all this brainstorming was going on, I was setting up Subversion (SVN) repositories on the server. I decided to move all the websites I’m working on into a new “projects synchronized/SVN” directory. I have been re-importing the directories and trying the integration features built-into Dreamweaver and Coda. The goal: source control that works cross-platform, with a minimum of fuss.

I had to make a few infrastructure decisions:

Decision 1: Although there is one SVN server, there are multiple SVN clients. Each SVN client potentially operates differently from each other, so I have to be a little careful about establishing some rules.

• Each computer has its own local checked-own version that is no longer manually-synched by DropBox. I have to manually check-in and update, which is better for development purposes anyway.
• On Windows, all website development is handled by the built-in Dreamweaver Subversion client TortoiseSVN (DW svn support is proving to be unreliable). All application development with Visual Studio will use TortoiseSVN or possibly a Visual Studio plug-in (Ankh, VisualSVN)
• On Macintosh, all website development is handled by Coda’s built-in subversion client. All application development with XCode will use its built-in client.

Decision 2: My working source media files and documentation are kept in the DropBox folder. This is the way it worked before. What’s changed is that I’ve moved the website folders outside of DropBox, to be managed by SVN instead.

Decision 3: I’m not committing binary media to the SVN repositories, so these directories remain unversioned.

• All graphic files, podcasts, PDFs, etc are not stored in SVN. Primarily because I am cheap with my server storage.
• All graphics files, podcasts, PDFs, etc are still kept in the working copy’s folder; they just aren’t versioned. Theoretically the server itself has the master backup. As the server itself is backed up fairly regularly, I am not worrying about using SVN redundantly for media backup.
• Any graphic files are stored in the regular project folder, exported to a local _export folder, and then copied to the working folders in SVN. This mirrors my usual deployment practice.
• I’m not versioning any of the WordPress or Plugins other than my own original source code. These files are already backed up by the server, and I’m not modifying them. I may study them, but I don’t need to version them. Every time a WordPress update occurs on the server, I’d have to download everything and recommit. Pain in the butt. So not versioning WP files. My own themes and plugins, though, I am versioning.

I’ve been uploading and tweaking the repos for the past few hours, while doing other things like cleaning the house. It’s been a pretty productive day, though it looks like I’ll be up to 4AM again. Oh well!

After finishing up the initial round of changes to davidseah.com by testing first on a staging server, I left Starbucks feeling productive and happy. When I got home, I thought of another tweak I could make, so I booted up the PC and made the adjustment. It was only afterwards that I noticed that I’d overwritten all the changes I’d made over the past four hours. I was livid.

As someone who makes a living doing digital media, I’ve learned how to manage my files in a certain way to avoid overwriting changes. My golden rule of thumb is NEVER WORK DIRECTLY ON THE SERVER, because what usually happens, inevitably, is that the master file gets overridden. So the way I work is to keep a master local copy and take period snapshots to a central server. This has been simplified greatly by adopting DropBox to synch all working copies across my Windows and Mac machines. Dropbox makes it possible to work on my master files from any computer, without having to manually copy the latest files to each computer.

Lately, I’ve been trying out MacOS X to see if it’s worth switching to. There’s some very cool software available for it, and one of the packages I’d been eyeing is Panic Software’s Coda web development editor. However, its paradigm appears to be “work on the server”, which is what I did. While Coda can save files locally, it isn’t designed to synchronize directories and files. Because file placement is so critical for web sites and web applications, it is kind of baffling to me that Coda has almost no support for maintaining the synchronization between local and remote sites. This makes me think it must be some philosophical stance the developer is taking regarding “work directly on your server” versus “develop locally and push your changes to the server”. Since I have enormous respect for Panic software, I’m presuming I am missing an important assumption on how to develop optimally with Coda.

I’ve had a couple of thoughts on this:

• Perhaps I should be using Subversion for version control
• Perhaps Coda developers are testing on their own local web servers instead of using a remote staging server.

In any case, there are some issues with workflow I need to figure out, because I hate losing work. HATE IT.

First Step

I already have a subversion repository on my server, but I use these primarily for Windows and Flash application development instead of for websites. I’ve never need to version the website work before because it was possible to work safe with my existing approach of “edit locally, push changes to server to view”, counting on DropBox to mirror my changes automatically and distribute them.

1. create svn repo for websites, using common credentials
2. upload working copy from Windows using TSVN
3. check out working copy using Coda

I downloaded an SVN cheatsheet. I had to remember a few things about the SVN setup. For my Media Temple (dv) running CentOS + Plesk, the svn setup is in /var/www/vhost/domain_name/conf/vhost.conf, and here I could find where the svn repo lived in the filesystem. All the configuration, including the user list and access control list (stored in /etc), are set up in the vhosts.conf. Adding a new repo was as easy as browsing to the repo folder and doing an svnadmin create name_of_repo. My credentials as administrator are already set up, though I could update the ACL to include other groups of users.

After this, I had to think of how to organize the repository. I thought briefly of putting all my web projects under one umbrella directory, moving it out of DropBox’s synched folder into a new SVN-synched folder. However, the problem is that commits to the repository would then be shared across all websites. So, if I did a commit to davidseah.com’s web files and the new revision # is 001, a commit to the completely-unrelated nonazon.com would result in a new revision # of 002. This makes it very difficult to keep track of what revision affected which site. So, that means that I really need to have a separate production repo for each website.

Secondly, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to version EVERYTHING. Really, I just need to version the parts of WordPress I’m working on (themes, plugins), and I don’t need to archive binary stuff. That said, I probably should go ahead and archive the key folders and files including the core wordpress files (might be helpful to detect hack attempts), and skip binary/image files and cache directories.

Gonna sleep on it.

After outlining what I needed to do yesterday, I fell into a period of avoidance that has lasted about 24 hours. I took notes on what I did instead:

• Caught up with all my Facebook and Google Plus contacts
• Replied to a few emails I’d been putting off
• Sent a few initiating emails to dormant prospective clients
• Played Star Trek Online, leveling a new character class
• Playing in the Wave with Colleen™
• Surfed the net on topics relating to Mila Kunis, Community, science education
• Made tacos using the new methodology, both with cheese lamination and without (cheese still wins)
• Tidied up the kitchen
• Slept

The entire time I was doing this, I was acutely aware of NOT doing the website. It was like I wasn’t in the mood to face it, though intellectually I knew there was an opportunity to get ahead of the game.

Which brings me back to paying attention and daily continuity. I’m at least looking at this again today, so I get a +1 for maintaining continuity. However, it’s the forcible paying attention (being made to look at something) that is the other hurdle. If I don’t look at the design of the content I made yesterday, I’m unlikely to work on it. And I didn’t want to, because I wasn’t 100% certain about how I would implement it. There are a lot of unknowns that are not impossible, but are of an unknown level of pain-in-the-assness. And I think I’m strongly wired to avoid that feeling of dealing with pains in the ass.

So…what is the intermediate step I can take to get around that? Well, knowing that it’s happening is a great first step. A good coping strategy might be to just commit to looking at the thing in the first place. JUST LOOK AT IT. FACE IT AND STUDY IT. NO NEED TO ACT ON IT YET. This is similar to my 15 minute coping mechanism for the daily continuity, a certain minimum threshold to deal with every day.

So I’m looking at the sheet now, and making this list:

• Making a second menu bar in theme. Make a new menu bar, insert the right snippet of code, and style it. I don’t remember exactly how to do it, but I know I can look it up in code I have already made. So…probably an hour? Let’s start with that.

• Subblog Topic Links in Sidebar. I don’t know how to do it through code, but I can make this happen with just a static Widget for now. Duh. 15 minutes. Let’s start with that instead.

• Slideshow in header. Well, I have to find a good slideshow plugin. Then I need to wedge it into the theme somehow, and create the content for it. I could make the code available first, and just not have it do very much. Or I can backburner this until I’m ready to think of content. The priority is probably just linking the subblogs.

• Welcome to Site Area: This is a theme adjustment. I want it to appear only on the homae page. I don’t remember how the theme files are structured, but the WordPress template hierarchy is fairly straightforward. I can use a combination of is_home(), is_archive(), is_category() and so on to decide what to show.

• Last Article: This is a theme adjustment, involving the loop on the front page. Mapping all the detection logic for this can be done on staging server.

• Click to see latest posts: This is just a link to a latests archives page of some kind. Let me see what it looks like now…oops, forgot to activate the page navi plugin. But I’ll worry about this later.

So…two things are the lowest hanging fruit that requires some technical juice: the second menu area at the top (and some visual restyling), and the welcome statement area. Let me get those two things done today.

Let me start with the second thing, because I had already done a web search.

Implement the Menu

I’m looking at header.php. The code below will create the menu with the “top-header-menu” id (not class, as args suggest) assigned to it, with the menu associated with location “top_header_menu”:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array(  'container' => false, 'container_class' => 'top-header-menu', 'theme_location' => 'top_header_menu' ) ); ?>

I also need to enable this theme location in functions.php by using register_nav_menu(), which registers a new menu location that appears in the Appearance->Menus admin panel:

if ( function_exists( 'register_nav_menu' ) ) {
    register_nav_menu( 'top_header_menu', 'Top Header Menu' );
}

That seems to work, and now I have to style it and rework the header a bit.

… a couple of hours pass …

Ok, new header, and some refinements to the CSS are done! Yay!

Yesterday I wrote that there were two main issues I had about the new website. It’s 3PM, somewhat later than I planned to really look at this, but had gotten caught up in making the kind of endless small website tweaks that I find myself drawn to: fixing some image formatting here, adjusting widths there, patching PHP Markdown Extra to open links in a new window, and other stuff like that. Continue reading →