Ikiru Design

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.

Just a quick note: I’ve hastily decided to switch Ikiru Design to an “orangified” version of my Carter’s Line theme. Mostly because I was getting bored with BWO_one, especially since I switched my blog, Frozen Toothpaste, to a modification of it.

We’re now presenting this site on the BWO WordPress theme, designed by us (well, really me, I’ll drop the corporate we). This is certainly not the final version of the theme, but it’s a demonstrative one.

The beautiful picture at left was one of (not the first) that I found when searching Google for “black white orange” which, as you may have guessed, is what the BWO is in this theme’s name stands for.

BWO is a very simple theme. It contains no images, displays only one font (Georgia, for better or worse), and uses only three colors “black,” “white,” and “orange.” That is to say that there no HEX values in the stylesheet (you can check if you like). These parameters were meant as both a challenge and as a good set of training wheels for the bike of WordPress theming (admittedly, a bad metaphor).

Because this is my first theme, and I’m sure it’s still missing a number of things, I’ve not declared it complete. But it’s a nice place to start.