Here I was, all excited about getting a new blog underway, with a new CMS to practice with, and of course, I blow it up within a day.

Which was stupid. I'm familiar enough with child-themes, having built a few with Wordpress. But my brain apparently checked out, and I went and heavily modifed the bootstrap-blog theme I was using. And then the next day, Grav notified me of updates that needed to be done. Being a good little web developer (ha), I always try to get updates in as soon as possible. Gotta keep those files up-to-date so the site stays secure, right?

So I updated Grav, as well as the theme, and everything just went to shit, to put it bluntly. It took me the better part of the day to figure what I'd done, and quite frankly, I'm still not sure I'm 100% certain what happened. On top of that, I don't even know why the new page I added -- once I had everything back to looking 90% of how it was -- won't show. It was a simple About page, but if I try to visit it, it just leads to the default home page (which is just my blog listings).

So back to the drawing board. Part of the reason I stopped debugging to write this out is sort of as a test. I want to make sure at least the blog posts show up. I can work on the individual pages seperately, just as long as the blog posts continue.

Fingers crossed!

I'm between projects at work, and there's only so much reddit I can peruse. One of the skills essential for a front end developer nowadays is Javascript and my skills have always been rusty at best. Rather than play on social media or my phone, I'm going to work on becoming more comfortable with Javascript. It's certainly a better use of my time.

There are dozens and dozens of resources out there, both free and paid. I think I'll start with some basics on YouTube and work my way over to freecodecamp. Or maybe vice-versa. Who knows. I'm also going to show what I'm learning here, and present it as if I were teaching you to code. I think that will help my overall learning process.

I'm going to start by trying to solve a question I was asked in an interview some months back, and see if I can work through that: Reverse a string. Let's go!

I'm not sure I could tell you how many blogs I've started over the years. I used to blog before it was called blogging, and was manually adding entries to HTML pages. While I might have been doing this for well over 20 years, I've certainly not been doing this consistently. Hopefully this time will be a bit different.

I like to write, when the mood strikes, and having a place to write about whatever I feel like writing about will be nice. As stated on the homepage, there's not really going to be any sort of focus; whatever strikes my fancy I suppose. There'll be talk of tech/geeky stuff, and music as well. Might be some photography plus the occasional photograph. Babbling mostly.

As this is the inaugural post, let me introduce myself. I'm Shad (my initials are SKI, hence the i-am.ski domain), an Arizona native currently living in Northern Virginia. I've lived here with my family for over twenty years now, and man does time fly. I work as a front end developer, but mostly I fix what the back end developers don't want to bother with. Which is mostly OK. I'm your typical suburbanite, with two kids (both grown), a house in the 'burbs, a truck, a motorcycle, and a wife who wishes I was was handier at fixing things. I'm one of those guys who can turn a two hour job into something that lasts all day with two or three trips to Home Depot or the auto parts store.

This website itself is pretty bare bones, and I plan on keeping it that way for the foreseeable future. Hopefully this helps me focus on the content rather than the presentation of said content. But I will give some of the geeky details: As of June of 2019, I'm using Grav to run it, as I a) like playing around with new CMS's and b) didn't feel like I need a database for anything. I'm running it with the Admin plugin to just make things a bit easier. It's running the Bootstrap Blog theme by Ayoze Hernández Díaz.

And that's about it. Like I said, trying to keep it bare bones.

I’ve talked before about lack of motivation and how actually trying to finish a project seems to defeat me every time. I’m in that zone again where I’m feeling like I want to start a new… something…. and I’ve noticed that when I’m getting this way, I start looking at how other people have accomplished things, or the tools they’ve used, and use that “research” as an excuse to not get started. Eventually that feeling of wanting to start something new, or finish something that’s perpetually in progress passes.

In sort, I find ways to defeat myself. I recognize that about myself, I know the key to fixing it is to do like Nike says and “Just Do It”.

Easier said than done I guess. I’m still stuck.

Updating here has come pretty much to a standstill, but I’m hoping to remedy that soon. I’ve decided that rather than bemoan the fact that I have too many interests (writing, music, photography, web design, etc…), and then get overwhelmed and not do anything towards being creative, I’m going to instead set aside time for each pursuit. Rather than focus on one, I’m going to dabble in all.

What’ll make this fun/frustrating is that I’m horrible with time management, and I can be seriously lazy. So we’ll see where this gets me. I’ve been thinking about this for the better part of two weeks, so I’m hoping when my 40th birthday rolls around (23rd of December for those keeping track at home and want to buy me something), that I’ll have a basic list of the things I want to accomplish, and a basic schedule of how I’m going to accomplish it.

Wish me luck.