Time for reflection on the year that’s passed us by. This isn’t my end of the year analysis, (that’s still being typed out). It’s been pretty tough at work and that has propagated into my overall anxiety in general. Not really as calm and collected as I’d like to be. I simply flip very quickly and have less patience than I usually would give something. I’m not the only one that seems to be reflecting about things, Chris has hinted at this before, so it will be interesting to see how he follows through with this promise to himself.
One of the things that I don’t like is loose ends. I don’t like unfinished projects. I have understood something very clearly about myself. I’ve got a lot of enthusiasm for different projects and ideas and I will see them through no matter what. The only problem is that these things tend to take a lot longer than I actually want them to. I’ve come to live with that, however I’ve also found out that I have to set myself a deadline and work towards that deadline. In the end while it might seem hard at first to get into the rythem the final outcome when you look back so long as there is consistency little by little Rome is built.
So looking back and looking forward at what I want from the next year and what I plan on doing. This is a long one, so be warned.
Broken Kode
BK will always be my primary and main focus. It's the first thing I check in the morning. I keep looking at it to see how I can enhance things and while walking down the street and an idea pops into my head I always think that I should really post that. If I could post everything that came into my head then I'd be as prolific in my writing as Podz is. The man is a machine. The main work that needs to be done on BK, is for me to get on and complete my re-align. I also want to finally clean up my code slightly and get rid of the indented CSS stylesheets that my plugins put into my XHTML. Effectively I want them linked externally not slapped into the damn code. That goes for Ultimate Tag Warrior, Livesearch and contact form.
I’m going to be retweaking my gallery section because to be honest I’m not terribly happy with it. I’ve got some ideas but I need to incorporate them into the v4.5 design. This leads into my next major item.
Weekly Illustration
Joen does an amazing thing every single month. He spends the time and creates these 5 illustrations that he posts and explains. The final product is often simple, however the execution and the thoughts are always exceptional. What makes me like these things even more is his consistency in delivery. He never misses a month and he's always there with them, fresh on the table for all to consume. I'm hopefully going to follow that model, except I'm planning on doing this on a weekly basis. Spend no more than 5hours on an single illustration, it could be a composition, it could be more but I will be using Photoshop and Freehand a lot more to create.
Broken Kode Blook
I've been working on this, and hopefully before I leave for Greece next week I'll have the formatting done and ready to go in Indesign, leaving me just with the illustration plates to complete in Athens. I've got 5 out of the 12 sorted out, however there's also the cover that needs to be sorted out and I need to bug
a certain somebody who will be writing the introduction to the blook. The deadline for entry into the
Blooker is to get the blook delivered to
Lulu is by the
30th of January, so I've got my work cut out for me.
Broken Kode Tees
These will happen next year. I'm sitting on the designs. All I need to do is go through a week of serious internet search and emails to find the best solution, and one that I can actually put my name behind and actually get these things off and out and about.
Shuttle
We have talked about this again and again. I think the entire Shuttle team HATES the fact that we haven't actually finished the work on this. The good news is that part of our hard work has already been included in the latest WordPress 2.0 builds. I won't go into details as to what is ours and what is the Dev team's addition, that's for another post when all of this has been completed. We are aiming to have the work behind Shuttle get included into the next version of WordPress (v5.4 or whatever). So that's a deadline right there for you (but mainly for us so that I can pull my finger out and just get it done).
Inksmith
This was always going to be a slow burner. However we're aiming to release something sometime early in 2006. I'm not going to talk more about it but this project will be phased in rather than one big massive splash. It will build and increase it's overall presence in the minds of the blogger slowly but surely. By taking our time and thinking things through, this will benefit everyone a lot more than doing a hack job. There's seriously no rush for these things.
Splash Panel
I honestly don't need to try hard at all to write my posts. I've got an opinion about every single book I read. My main hassle is finding the time to actually do the redesign for the site, which will also bring put the site in the right direction as to what I want it to be. The hardest thing at the moment however is deciding which graphic novel I should be reviewing next. There are just too many choice and they increase more every single week. I'll never be in a position of thinking about what to write about.
Splash Panel basically writes itself.
Borg
Codename: Borg is something I'm very excited about.
Jonathan was helping me out with a bit of CSS this week and he did something that to him was completely natural and simple, that seriously impressed me. That's when I realised that the coding is best left to people that actually KNOW what they're doing, and he definitely does. We'll hopefully announce what this is all about early in the new year as we've been hammering and chipping away at it. We're not going to announce everything until we're effectively in Beta, so that's the first hint that it's an application....oh let the speculation being.
Sharq
Bryan and I will get round to this. I have a battle plan for this and hopefully we'll be able to follow through in the new year. It's going to be tough for the both of us, however it's something that we're both seriously excited about. It's definitely going to fill and niche that's missing in the WordPress community.
Art & Poetry
Stathis and I are working together on a book. It's going to be a mixture of his poetry and my paintings. Definitely another slow burner, however he's got the amazing talent of BITCHING and moaning at me ALL day about this. I thought I was an enthusiastic fellow, until I told him that this would be something that could be really cool to do. It's going to be in full colour, and if can get it hardbound that's the way we're going to go.