Not with the theme development, but with the writing. I’m enjoying both the progress and the journaling, but it occurred to me today that I’m concentrating so much on churning out little updates on my progress that I’m not leaving myself time to write about anything else. SO from this point on I’m going to try and keep tabs on my daily progress and write about this particular project maybe once a week. Hopefully that will give me time to write a little about some of my other interests… because they are MANY!
Today’s little bit of headway came from a change in tooling rather than a ton of progress on the theming front. I woke up this morning around 4a.m. – a bout of early-rise insomnia that seems to be more and more of a common occurrence as I get older. Most days I just lie in the bed alternating from attempting to get back to sleep to sulking, but today I actually resigned myself to my fate, got out of bed, and headed into the living room to hammer on this theme. Or so I thought.
Maybe it was the irritability inherent with not having a full night’s sleep, but I was not feeling the situation of working from Hostinger’s web-based file browser anymore. It works fine for an edit or two but when you’re constantly making and saving changes like this project demands it slows you waaaay down.
I’d just installed Visual Studio Code (under protest because… well, Microsoft) to start reviewing Golang code for a friend of mine. I was (and am) in the process of not only learning Golang, but learning IDEs in general. It’s a HUGE learning curve for a guy that’s spent his entire meager coding existence working from things like Notepad, Nano, and other basic text editors and writing print statements for debugging. I have two legit coder friends and both of them have told me multiple times to get an IDE – that it would save me a lot of time learning and writing code. I’ve just gotten around to that. I know. Don’t judge.
ANYway I was just starting to make friends with VS Code after installing and updating Golang, setting up the toolsets, and other miscellaneous goat-ropery that comes with this line of work, and it dawned on me that the real advantage here is that I’m not relying on a single tool anymore. I don’t have a hammer… I have a Swiss Army knife! Why not take advantage of this period of learning? Granted, it feels like push-starting a freight train, but why not go all in if the end result is I can do more faster? Why not set up VS code for PHP while I’m at it?
As it turns out, no project I start is ever as straightforward as it seems. This is no exception. Setting up an IDE is completely different than opening a text editor 😉 Installing languages, toolsets, network (SFTP) connection configuration, and all that jazz took me longer than I would have liked, because… you know, New Jack.
So I ran out of time. I spent maybe ten minutes plinking at the css and made a couple of minor adjustments – mainly in the site title link color change, heading font size change, and getting the main content off the left-hand side of the screen for a little better readability:
THAT BEING SAID, I have high hopes that the newly (but incompletely) configured IDE will save me a TON of time over the long run, even though the first few times operating it I felt a little like I was – to quote Brian Regan – trying to exercise in a painter’s scaffolding. Just click that link and watch the whole bit, it’s hilarious. Yeah, it felt kinda like that. But I think I’m almost set with that now, and I really am looking forward to speeding up my workflow with the new tools.
Wish a New Jack luck.