Chomer Speaks

It is amazing to me sometimes how one minute I can be focused, working away towards achieving some goals… And the next minute I can be paralyzed emotionally and find it to get even the simplest things accomplished. Feelings can be a bear to deal with can they?

I have accomplished stuff… but it is easy for me to get discouraged.

• Got all three of my workbenches put together in the basement. The area is still a complete mess. Just looking at it floods me with discouragement. Allot of the stuff piled up in this area is not mine and I don’t relish figuring out where to put it or negotiating with the owner in an attempt to get it tossed.
• Got books on Amazon eCommerce API. Looks good, but I’m not jumping in deep on this yet.
• The books I’ve ordered in programming the iPhone and hacks in movie making (the ones I am most interested in) have not come yet. Some are not available yet. But, in my opinion, the others should have shipped from Amazon by now.
• I got my bathroom exhaust fans… now I need to hire an electrician to install them. This should go a long way in getting rid of the problem of damp walls and mildew.
• I’ve been toying with my WebRenegade web framework. But actual  work is hard to come by due to those irrational emotions.
• I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a successful install of mySQL on my PC at home. So far no luck. This has been trully frustrating!

Well, writing this makes me feel a bit better.

I am getting thoroughly dissatisfied with the design of my web site again. I’m looking for that right balance of nice presentation, easy updating, good navigation, etc.

I’ve not found it yet.

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify!

More and more lately I’m out trolling the Net looking for some good site design examples that capture the essence of what I’m looking for. I’ve been tweeking around with some CSS and HTML locally on my computer trying to find that magic something or other.

It shouldn’t have to be this hard!

I’ve been pondering just making my whole site a blog. One thing is for sure, I’d really like it to be some sort of complete content management system (one that would run on my web host and not cost allot, and has the features I want).

Of course this has gotten me back to thinking about writing my own CMS. I’ve started and abandoned this idea several times! I have written simple CMSes before. I used to have a site: “vbmaster.net” It used a CMS I wrote in ASP/MS Access. It worked pretty well. I got sick of running it and so I stopped. I lost ownership of the domain due to letting it expire and some spammer has the domain now.

That CMS was primitive. Too primitive for what I want to do now.

And, naturally, that got me thinking about the Movieland Directory. This site has a CMS that I wrote. Well, I started working on a newer, better design for this site months ago. I left off working on it quite awhile back though. Well, allot of what I need is already done. So I started thinking about picking up work on this project again. The point though: thinking only! No actual work on it yet!

I think that I have software constipation right now!

I started doing some investigating on what I would like as far as my site’s appearance. This is not going to be something that changes over night. More and more I’m realizing that to capture what I’m looking for is going to take a lot of thought, research, and testing. Ah well.

One of the ideas floating around in my mind is having videos on every page that are ambient. That is stuff automatically playing when the page comes up, little or no sound, and displaying in a subtle way that contributes to the “feeling” I’m trying to capture.

I did a first experiment here and found as I suspected, that the flash video player I used is an actual “window” as far as Microsoft architecture goes. What that means is that I cannot overlap it with a layer… i.e. DIV tags, etc. This rules out allot of concepts (unless I learned to use Flash).

There is still allot to look into. Allot about using color, layout, etc.

In the latest iteration of the look of Chomer.com and it’s blog, I was pretty satisfied. Now I feel a subtle discontent that is steadily growing. For one thing, the blog doesn’t render perfectly (I need to delve deeper into the CSS HTML machinations of Wordpress). Even if I did get that straightened out, it’s just not quite what I’m looking for.

For starters, I want something that has a cleaner look. A bit more professional. But I also want it to be beautiful. A site that if someone appreciates beauty, they will come to the site just to look at it regardless of the content. I know, that sounds crazy, but I want something that I would just want to look at. A web site that is Art. Something you might think about putting in an art museum.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to have content, and good content at that, but I want to strike that perfect blend of beauty and content.

It would be nice if the site layout/look were COMPLETELY separate from the content. Not just as far as files i.e. CSS, but something more dynamic, something where I can change the look on the fly and see what it will look like before I apply it. No, I’m not talking about canned blog Themes.

In the past I’ve kind of done a random, gut feel build-as-I-go type of design. I’m planning on doing some more thorough research on this subject. I do what to look at allot of blog themes, and allot of different web sites to see their page layouts/styles. I want to note down the ones that I find appealing.

There is a need to focus in on color. I am striving for a calm, relaxed, sort of zen feeling to the site.

Some of the ideas I want to do I’ve not seen anywhere. Many of these ideas I’ve partially proved as technically feasible. What I DON’T want to do is take a great idea and implement it in a sloppy manner.

Allot of thought needs to go into how the navigation works on the site. How the pages are laid out.

I’m also thinking about using my Renegade web framework on my own site. This would give it some credibility as well as improve the overall user experience on Chomer.com.

Do you have any ideas, do you know of any examples I might like? Point them out to me. Any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.