My mind seldom stops working, occasionally coming to the point where I struggle to focus on even one thought at a time (by which point I normally get a headache, feel sick and have to go make a cup of tea or something). I currently have a rather large work load that is set by myself. Alongside a rather large workload set by college – if only you could get qualified doing what you loved the way you love, but I digress.
One of my pet projects taking up my time is improving my rudimentary knowledge of PHP by re-writing my image host from scratch, rather than adding database functionality to Cheverato. I suppose it would have been easier if the comments and variable names were not all in Spanish.
So far I’d put it at about version 0.0.1, seeing as it has basic user -> database functionality and most of the front-end functions are working (image flagging, paginated gallery, registration and search with paginated results) but they are not implemented in an interface that is usable by the public. I’ve not formatted the data past just spewing out the raw Mysql data, nor have I implemented user access levels. But it’s getting there, chipping away at it piece at a time.
One thing I found interesting about when I started is that I approached it in much the same way as I would designing a wordpress theme, forum layout or any other stylistic work I do. Scribbling down a rough sketch and then plowing through it. Strangely this haphazard manner of planning didn’t cut it for a project that requires more than images and code, but a structure. Once I’d scribbled down a plan it became much easier to see what to script into it, and where it should go.
Another job which is important is the preparation of vB4 skins. At present playstuff has the Orange skin set up and collecting a lovely group of bug threads and issues – quite a few being something inherited from the stock theme which means us Administrators ending up having to fix a product that was paid for – thus my scathing review below this post. But it has, since its creation, had a blue skin in tandem with it (because mainly I like blue, and it’s nice to have a bit of choice). I’m holding that off until the maintenance updates later on this month.
I also have various finishing touches to another forum I had to convert its skins to vBulletin 4. Mainly profile fields on postbits and the like, less than exciting but needed.
My final task will be to redesign this website. Glassy is a theme that’s sat on my desktop for about 6 months and like anything you code six months ago, it looks awful when compared to what you know now. It’s pretty incomplete but it was the best thing at the time to put on here.
Will no doubt take me months.
