Ikiru Design

I’ve been giving it some thought, and I think I’ll be better off publishing this site twice a month rather than once. Doing so will allow my to keep momentum, and make me feel more comfortable publishing more “here’s a thought or plugin you might not know” stuff. So instead of the first of every month, I’ll be publishing here on the 5th and 25th of every month. (If you’re wondering why such odd dates, it’s because I like the number 5 and these comfortably allow me to keep up my every 15th schedule at Frozen Toothpaste).

It has been more than two years — that thing they say about years going faster as you get older is true — since I published a post here. Quite nearly as long since I did anything at all on this site. I can’t say that I’ve really missed it. While I do sometimes enjoy making things using internet languages, I’ve never had a degree of mastery that makes that making a constantly-fun thing to do.

Lately I’ve been itching to be better are this whole web design and development thing, but that doesn’t mean I miss the 20 minute hunts to realize I forgot a semicolon. (This may not be a problem you face frequently, greater master of the coding arts, but its one this distractable newbie has faced many times.) But whether I was missing this aspect of the web or am just hoping to be better at it, the best way to remedy either of these states is to do it more.

And so I’m hoping to do here what I did on my essay-based blog about a year ago: set myself hard and clear deadlines and hold to them. Since I resolved to publish once a month over there, I’ve not missed. Much of the stuff was hard to make myself do, competing as it was for my non-infinite free time against massively enjoyable and very easy things. Compared to the other things I do with my free time, writing’s hard work. So is coding. Even CSS is hard compared with all the easily accessible and fun alternatives my privileged life presents me.

But I mean it. It is now resolved that on the first of the month I will require myself to publish a post at this blog. Some of those will doubtless reflect 35 hours of dinking around in text editors and FTP clients. Others will probably be just an interesting thing that I thought of that seemed relevant to these topics. But in either case they will at least represent some small effort to be better at this “web thing”, and so I’ll get better, even if only at a crawl.

This site is no longer dead.

As I suggested earlier, I’ve been casting around for a plan that would assure that I didn’t again neglect Ikiru Design in the way I recently have been. This is both an issue for my free themes — which I first planned to have at 1.0 on January 1, then January 15, then ???, now ????? — and for general read-worthy content on this site.

On the first problem, I don’t yet have a good solution.

On the second, I have this: one post a week. This is meagre compared to the five a week I average at Frozen Toothpaste, and the five a day I average at Link Banana, but those are different sites with different topics and objectives. Once a week is a realistic goal which I feel confident I can achieve. This is roughly what I was doing before I took an almost accidental hiatus, and if I really commit to it I’m sure it’s something I can expect to manage.

This could also work to force me to do more work on my free themes, as in an inspiration-less week I could still have some easy-to-accomplish CSSing to fill the gap. That’s the new plan, and now that it’s public I hope I’m more likely to stick to it. And that’s not a lot, but it’s something.

I just changed the theme here back to the first theme I ever made: BWO. This is for a couple reasons, probably the most important is that I’ve been using Carter’s Line (which I was using here) at my link blog, Link Banana. It’s also because I’ve been negligent regarding this site and its themes. And I really would like to work on it more regularly.

As the title of these few paragraphs suggests, I’m not ready to say that I’m back to doing this regularly. But I’m thinking about how best to make sure I don’t neglect this so seriously in the future, while assuring that it doesn’t monopolize more time than I can give it.

I’ll be sure to let you know when I figure out a plan.

A while ago I promised that all of my currently-available themes would be updated to version 1.0 by January 1, 2008. Today is January 1, 2008 and not a single one of them is at 1.0. I did start the process, and make noticeable improvements. Carter’s Line, BWO, and BWO_one are now all at 0.80.

But that still leaves BWO_space and BWO_doodle behind. And it leaves some problems I have with the current 0.80 releases intact. So I can’t declare success on this goal, and I don’t foresee being able to do so today.

I do have a number of excuses to claim for my failure. There’s of course the unexpected holiday chaos (which I should probably expect by now), my recent decision to start a new blog, and the fact that I simply found the updates — a rather tedious and dull activity because the errors across these themes are very similar — too boring to spend much time on.

None of these excuses count for much, and so perhaps the most important point is this: I will have the updates done ASAP, and certainly no later than January 15. The penalty for not making that deadline is death.