I went live with the new theme for this blog a few days ago. I didn’t have nearly as much time to work on it as I would have like. When all is said and done I don’t hate it. Yeah, it’s not super stylish, but it’s functionally clean and has a neat element or two. I think the angled corners turned out nice. They’re kind of like the rounded edges that are all the trend, but different enough to stand out. I also when with an extra large banner, which would usually go against my design beliefs. I usually don’t like large banners because they push the important part of the site, the content, down. But in this case the giant header will hold information about my current project, which is the focus of this blog anyway.

Languages:
php, xhtml, css

Database:
MySQL

Open Source Software Used:
Wordpress, ProgressFly

Technologies:
Photoshop 6 and CS

My first time working with:
Wordpress Plugins

Popularity: 6% [?]

I’ve been getting killed at work and haven’t had nearly enough time to put into re-designing this blog.  I am finished however, although I did take an extra day or two.  I’ll will be rolling out the design in the next day or two.  I also have a fun idea (and great domain name) for next month’s project, which I’ll be announcing shortly.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I cranked out the project tracking plugin in about an hour and a half.  Well just the admin side of it.  I’ll work on how it will be displayed as I continue with the design.  I pretty much took the ProgressFly plugin as a base and modified it to fit my needs.  I’ll probably release the code/plugin once I have it cleaned up a bit.  I called the plugin in “ProjecTrackr”, which continues my trend of combing words that end and start with the same letter and dropping one instance of the letter (eg, RSStalker).  I also dropped the ‘e’ to make it fit this Web 2.0 thing all the kids seem to be into now a days.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I was initially going to go with a black/grey look, but decided to head in a different direction and use a maroonish color. I don’t think I’m too crazy about it and will probably move to a different color scheme. I’ll probably try something like the Red Bull blue/silver combo next. I also don’t like the layout - it’s very formulaic. Header graphic, main content, right nav. I’m want something less cookie cutter, but I think I’ll need to do the project management pluggin first, to see how it fits in.

I do like the angled edges. They were a bit tricky to figure out the best way to do in Photoshop, but I’ve got a system down now. If I do a hard edge on the angle I can make the background corner transparent, which allows me to play with the color/pattern below it. The softer edge looks a bit nicer, but means less flexability.

Another annoyance is that I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress for my development and now I get a bunch of “?”s in my posts. I’ve seen this on other sites, but I haven’t tried to figure it out yet.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I meant to announce June’s site earlier, but I’ve been busy. For June I will focus on my biggest weakness as a website builder - design. The goal is to spruce up with blog with a cool, trendy look and hopefully learn some tricks I can use in the future. Coming up with and implementing a design will probably take up most of the month, but I would also like to improve the project management tools.

I have been using ProgressFly as a way to track how far along a site is, but it is limited. Basecamp seems like a great web based project management tool, but it’s probably over kill for what I’m doing. Plus I like having the information available to the readers blog, rather than in some password protected site. I really just want a pluggin where I can enter some tasks and maybe the estimated time to complete. Then by checking off a task the progress meter will automatically update. The nature of this experiment may cause the project meter to jump around as I complete tasks, then add more to the list, depending how much of the month is left.

I also want to keep track of the time I spend on each site. I work a regular 40 hour a week job, I do some consulting on the side and I have a wife and newborn baby, so it can be hard finding the time to work on these sites. I would estimate I spent 30-40 hours on RSStalker. Dealing with the XML from Amazon, then generating CSS and debugging/caching the feeds took a lot of time. The widget probably took me 15-20 hours mostly getting used to writing widgets and getting it to look the way I wanted, since laying out a widget is entirely different then laying out a website. StadiumTraveler.com was around 15 hours of work. These are all rough estimates, but I would like a way to keep better records going forward.

The project management pluggin probably won’t take more then a few hours, which should allow me to devote a fail amount of time to the design. I’m not really sure what direction I’ll be going in just yet. I know I want something “Web 2.0″ish, but not just a copy of whats out there. Sort of an evolved Web 2.0 look. For example rather than the rounded corners that are so prevalent, I might try an angled corner.

As always I’ll try to post updates on my progress.

Popularity: 4% [?]