Working Furiously Behind the Scenes

My mind is absolutely crackling these days. Between intellectual challenges at work (the good kind) and diving ever deeper into this platform here at home it’s been an exhilarating week or so. Life away from the screen is pretty damned good, too. There have been a few times jumping between work and this site when I could just feel my brain running flat-out, those problem-solving and creativity centers absolutely cranking away up there, my hands and fingers flying over the keys furiously in front of me.

It’s the same sort of sensation I would get during late childhood or early adolescence on occasion, lost while reading deep into the abyss of a particularly riveting novel. The brain’s language center by that age is robust enough to absolutely devour words off the page and yet it still has those vast, childlike capacities for imagination and wonder.

I’m starting to see visitors trickle into the site now, and it’s tempting to drop everything I’m doing and immediately focus on content. “Ooh, someone’s here! Hi, thanks for coming, whoever you are. [Shit, I wasn’t prepared for this] Let me find something quick to entertain you.” I am ignoring that impulse for now, and probably will for weeks or months to come. I am posting albums, articles and things of that nature, sure, but mostly to test features and designs. The rough plan in my mind forms into three phases, roughly looking something like this:

The (Rough) Plan

  1. Build the site’s functionality and enable the capabilities that will perfectly complement my content. When construction is finally complete, what does my involvement look like? What am I sharing? What am I posting? What are visitors doing when they get here?

Custom metadata and content types in WordPress. Shown here is my attempt at creating a library of hikes and trails.

2. Load the site up with content. Stock it richly with photos, albums, stories, trips, maps — all the stuff that lights my fire when I’m away from the screen. I’ve got 15 years worth of adventures stored on these hard drives, and I know there are some relics in there worth digging out and sharing. Discover what I can offer that is truly unique and truly of interest.

3. Launch the site when I fell it’s ready to share content in meaningful, organized way, and that the site is interesting and well-stocked to the point that most people feel like they’ve gotten something out of their visit.

Some of the CSS I have written for the site so far. These are the little nudges that get the site’s elements looking and functioning the way I want. I am not the cleanest CSS architect but I’ve always found it immensely satisfying.

Launching the site also means proactively broadcasting it. Nothing too crazy, but the plan is to pull back on what I would normally share on social media and place it here instead. I can create my albums and share my stories here and have it fire off automatically or with a single click out to all my social networks. The beauty in that model is that the content still lives here. And if they come here to get it, perhaps they will stick around and discover more things they like.

So for the near future, I’ll be writing a little more CSS and hammering more plugins into place to try and build the capabilities I want. I’m pleased with the design so far and the direction it’s heading. I have been taking some time for creative writing, too, sometimes late into the night. It’s not all tech all the time, there has been some creative fury, too.

I am almost done developing my first custom post type with its own taxonomy and metadata, and hopefully from the screenshot here you can get a sense of one of the custom things I’m trying to do. I’ve been working with WordPress for years, and SharePoint professionally for many years. WordPress has always been king of flexibility and usability. SharePoint is the corporate behemoth, incredibly scalable and the font from which I draw all my knowledge of classification, metadata and taxonomy. Those words are starting to mesh and I love it.

My fingers can hardly move fast enough sometimes, and that feels really good. I’m obsessed at the moment, but I promise I don’t gush about this stuff in real life.