All right, so one of the reasons I have started fooling around with this site again is that I have been getting a lot of interest from my clients about Web design. In the past, I’ve always used WordPress – and more recently Divi on top of WordPress, to be able to quickly turn out a site that a client will 1) like and 2) actually get some use out of. You can see some examples of what I can get done with Divi and WordPress over at GreymanIndustries.com I do a pretty decent job if I do say so myself!
But alas… Divi and WordPress is NOT WordPress, and the ugliness that you see here is ample evidence of that. You will see by it’s … well, let’s say ‘ascetic’ flavor that I am NOT using Divi on this site. The reason for that is that I fully intend to use JulianVickers.com as a means to not only talk about the things that interest me and that I’m actively working on, but ALSO to be a test platform for dealing with vanilla WordPress. No abstraction trickery like Divi, no fancy theme assists… just raw WordPress taken to whatever heights I can take it to.
As you can tell, the current height of my unassisted WordPress wizardry is – let’s face it – completely pathetic. I purposefully chose a minimalist theme to learn with and thus far the only thing I can really say I’ve done is turn it brown. Hip hip hooray. I know that WordPres is COMPLETELY customizable and that – with the right knowledge – I should be able to make this spartan theme look any way I so choose, but the learning curve is steep… which brings me to the title here.
There is a short list of people in this world that I am completely, INSANELY jealous of, and people that can tackle a gigantic learning curve with seemingly no effort are near the top of that list. I absolutely, completely, one hundred and ten percent HATE learning curves, and the people I am talking about here seem to be able to skip that and learn just about any task while seeming to bypass that curve… just HOW?!? One of the things that I in my 47 years (as of 2022) on this planet have been unable to master is “how to learn.” Yeah, I do a lot of things passably well, but it seems to take me an inordinate amount of time in each of the disciplines I work in to achieve the master of the basics. My talent, it seems, is to be able to apply those basics in new and unexpected ways after I get the hang of said basics. But GETTING the basics? Takes FOREVER!
So as time goes on I expect I will slowly and painfully master WordPress without ‘cheating’ by throwing frameworks on top of it. I just felt the need to vent for a minute after spending I-don’t-know-how-long this afternoon trying to do the simple task of expanding the %#^*@ width of this site so I can put galleries and other goodies in it. Bear with me while I take this journey, and know that until I get that magical, satisfying ‘click’ you’ll be looking at a barren, brown, narrow site.
I look forward to the day I get to go to the Wayback machineand grabbing a shot of this post for future me to gloat over.
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