The SPRINT I declared last week didn’t happen, because I forgot I had declared it. So I’ve shelved it so I can push to create a new dynamic home page that will help me keep track of what I’m doing. I look at my home page ALL THE TIME, probably several times an hour; if I can add some useful task tracking to the bookmark listings, that may help me keep focused.

I’m detailing the coding in the /code, so in this post I'll just summarize the last week.

Uh.

Well, it's been slow but steady progress on three things:

• figuring out how to practically implement a web app on top of WordPress
• learning how to create databases and use them from PHP
• figuring out how to map task management to a new program architecture that I've never made before

So...plenty to keep me busy. I've absorbed enough about SQL, PHP, and programming interactive stuff over the years to at least know how it's theoretically supposed to work. The new part is putting it all together using unfamiliar platforms and technologies. But hey...that's how you learn them!

While it would have been nice if some off-the-shelf solution existed, I find that with this kind of application you're better off just making up ways to build the framework yourself so you can see the trouble points first hand. It may take longer than kludging an existing framework into a semblance of a finished product, but in the last 30 percent of the project the streamlined architecture you come up with will mop up the floor with the bolt-together. Well, that's the goal...I write for flexibility and clarity, embedding my knowledge of the platform directly into the code and its supporting architectural concepts, so the result is usually pretty bulletproof and easy to modify. But it takes a lot of synthesis and trial and error to get there!