greghines.net

As mentioned in my previous post, this site represents a push away from some of my usual tendencies—notably procrastination. And while I mentioned a couple of key areas of improvement for this site, I was rather vague about what I was planning to do.

So thanks to advice from John B. Kendrick in the first comment on this blog, I’m going to make a list of what needs to be done and how I’d like to accomplish it. There’s apparently a formalized method to this process, but I don’t need to attend a seminar to tell me that creating a TODO list helps me keep track of what needs to be done.

As mentioned before, there’s a lot of missing functionality on this site. To add that functionality, I’ll need to:

• Make URLs hackable.
• Create the /blog page.
• Customize the front page.
• Create node types for articles, reviews, projects, etc.
• Create a projects section.

I’m certainly missing some pieces that I’ll figure out along the way. I’ll add them to this list as I think of them.

Wherever possible, I’ll be using contributed modules to provide this functionality for me. This saves me a vast amount of work and, thanks to the magic of open source, nets me updates without doing much—if any—work. Almost-certain inclusions are Views, CCK, and Fivestar.

Where necessary, I’ll write custom code. I’ve been writing Drupal modules for over a year now and I can modify Drupal in virtually any way I desire. The amount of customization is limited by the amount of time and energy I’m willing to invest in it. For the sake of my free time, I’ll try to keep it within reason.

There’s also the matter of creating a custom theme. I’ll most likely work on this after the functionality-related items have been completed because that may influence the structure of the site. Here’s how I’ll approach the theme:

• Sketch out a series of wireframes.
• Sketch out some design ideas.
• Implement the design in Photoshop.
• Slice up the Photoshop files into images for the theme.
• Create a base theme to start from a clean slate.
• Create the Drupal theme and start piecing it all together.

With the additional functionality and custom theme in place, I should finally have a site that I’m happy with. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

When it comes to the web, I’m impossible to please. Especially if I’m creating something for myself. And so, while I’ve worked on countless sites for others over the years, I’ve never had a true web presence until now.

I’ve made innumerable false starts along the way. I’ve tried every blogging system and CMS out there and come up with nearly a dozen designs. Yet despite it all, my domain sat empty.

My standards aren’t any lower today than they’ve ever been, really, but I’m learning to ignore them when they come at the expense of getting things done. That’s what I’m doing here now: I’m learning to create a web site for myself… despite myself.

This site is far from complete. While it’s built on the platform I intend to use for the foreseeable future, Drupal, I find it lacking primarily in two ways:

First, while Garland isn’t an offensive theme, it’s hardly something I’d like to use for long. It’s a little too plain and because I’ve been working with Drupal for some time now, I’m a little tired of it. So I’ll create a custom theme that better suits my taste.

Second, there’s a lot of missing functionality. The URIs aren’t hackable; the front page is nothing more than a list of blog posts; and there’s no integration with any of the other services I use on the web. Most of what I’d like to do (the way I want to do it) will require custom code, which is fine by me. I’ve had plenty of practice.

And so I consider this site version 0.5. The minimum amount of functionality exists to run the site but there’s still a lot to get done. In the meantime, I’ll start writing.

Hi. My name is Greg Hines and I’m a geek. As such, I plan to write, in large part, about geeky things like the web, computers, and anime. I’ll write about other things, too, like movies and politics (only occasionally, I swear). And with some luck, I won’t be the only one reading it all.

Now that introductions are out of the way…