State of Learning Update

This week has been full of playing with WordPress and tweaking my current theme. I see pro’s and con’s to working with a theme, the good is: that you have a fully functioning wordpress site up and running, you get to study somebody else’s CSS to see how they do things, and while your inside tweaking settings to your liking you get to see and interact with the PHP that wordpress is built on. The bad is: your dealing with somebody else’s way of doing things some of which you may not understand. I wanted to start with a very simple theme and dig into the source to see how it all worked and be able to customize the theme to match my current web site cliff538.com.

I started with minimalism 1.0.3 by Christian Genaehr and have been very happy with it. I’ve been able to structure things the way I want and have learned a lot by looking at how Christian set things up. Now that I’ve learned some I am anxious to make my own wordpress theme from scratch. I’m looking at some basic “wire frame” packages to help you get started and will be commenting later on which one I find works best.

This past week has also brought back my flow of working a few hours in Photoshop every other day or so. Building PS skills just takes time playing with the software. I usually am doing a tut (tutorial) from one of the many PS tut sites or playing with my own pictures to enhance or fix them. The current tut I am doing right now is here I am really liking this one, learned some new tricks and am hoping to incorporate it into my web site. I am always amazed at the power of PS.

Still have to dive deeper into JavaScript, have been doing some reading but I think I’m going to sign up for the JavaScript class over at O’Reilly School of Technology. The structure of it is good for me I think. I tend to jump around, with so much to learn in so many areas I spend just small amounts of time in each one and really need to slow down and focus on a smaller list. Which brings up the questions how much do you learn in each area? How much time do you spend in an area of learning? Which things should you focus on? Well, so much depends on what you want to accomplish, right? I am slowly starting to think that I will never be a programmer, the time involved in learning is monumental and I’m not even sure I have the smarts to figure it all out! Right now the goal is to just learn how to take somebody else’s programming and incorporate it or apply it to your own web site. Learning how to use and maybe slightly modify JavaScript and PHP for wordpress is huge in it’s own right. I have been playing with JQuery and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) there is a steep learning curve on how to implement these into your own site, I’ve been using my MAMP Web Server on my macbook pro and it’s been working great. If you haven’t set up a web server on your computer using MAMP give it a try it really is a time saver in experimenting and learning all this new stuff!

Well thats about it for this week, If your new to all of this and are just learning or your making your first web site drop me a note I’d love to check out your work and learn something from you!! back to my Photoshop tut……… Cheers!

Tagged as: News, State of Learning, updates