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2015 – Communicating my goals to myself

January 11 2015

One of the things that is a bit odd about setting goals and doing all this work is that when I’m done, the list isn’t the sort you just memorize. You need to work on it regularly to make progress, and you need a way to remind yourself what the goals are so you don’t skip one. I hesitate to say “see the big picture” as it isn’t exactly about the bigger picture. It’s about seeing the details. So I’ve put them all in a single graphic for myself. Eight overarching goals, 25 ongoing, and 11 bucket list items. I know, 44 sounds like a lot. But PolyWogg 4.0 can handle them. I’m committed to the quest.

The other thing I want to do is give myself a separate logo for the year. Given that I’m pitching it to myself as a quest, something a little “knight”-like seems in order. So I went back into the archives and found a crest that resembles the Sadleir crest, which is the closest I can find. Add in my 2015 stuff, and I’m good to go.

I’m tempted to put those on a mouse pad or something. Maybe even a T-shirt for the knight logo. I like it a lot. Not that it is amazing artwork, or stellar creative work, but rather that I have something “different” than usual. Something unique to the year that reminds me that it is not business as usual. Whether or not it will help me visualize my goals or not is another story.

I’m still working on my detailed tracker though. I did find a nice planner over at ProductiveFlourishing. They have some of the best planning templates for personal use out there, and they’re all free. They update them every month, just click and download. They’re in editable PDF so they’re pretty good to use right out of the box. Unfortunately, I’ve been at this awhile so out-of-the-box options don’t usually work well for me, but they were enough to give me a good template that I replicated in ExCel and could then move things around, edit, tweak, etc. I’ve done the one for work, just trying to figure out what exactly to do for the blog tracker for the month/year plus my own goal tracker.

In the meantime, I’ve got my logo to keep me focused.

Version 2.3 of my website…

May 15 2010

So, I disappeared for most of a year with the arrival of my son. And after I got a whole host of movie reviews up on the old site, DRUPAL started giving me glitches. It never looked quite right, so I opted to just ditch worrying about it.

But in the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about what I really want the site to do and how I want to approach it, and finally came to some basic realizations.

My hoster is fine if I don’t muck around with databases.
If I avoid heavy databases like MYSQL or MSSQL, that takes a whole whack of content management systems out of the equation. Including MediaWiki which I actually managed to get working closer to what I wanted, even though it was using a database. But in the end, it was still too complicated for what I wanted to do, and not worth the overhead.
If I look at “light” CMS packages, there are only a couple that really stand out as worth testing. So I did test them, and right now I really like GPEASY. Admittedly, the documentation is not huge, but my needs are simple. And the guy who created the package and who runs the website forums is REALLY helpful with answering questions.

I managed to start with a FaceBook-like theme, and tweak it almost beyond recognition in colours, etc., and still have 98% of the original code untouched. And best of all, it has a really good online editor that allows me to paste text from a simple editor or just type from scratch, along with lots of little formatting options. Still glitching with the 1.5 line spacing after each paragraph, but I’ll work on that over time.

I also need to ditch a second logo that is showing up, add in separate colours for the background of top and bottom, edit the sidebar, rename the blog, and edit the footer. Then on to Movie Reviews!

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2015 – Communicating my goals to myself

Version 2.3 of my website…