Twenty Thirteen

It’s a new year and here’s what I’d like to do more and less of.

Writing & Reading More

If there’s anything I’ve learned about working on the Internet, it’s that you need to be able to communicate well and talk about the things that matter to you. I’ve always been okay at writing and loved the process, but I haven’t done a lot in 2013. So, I hope 2014 can change that.

I’m working on a blog called ARWHD, where I’m going to be working on writing about freelance stuff, web design and more stuff, it should be the thing to kick my ass in gear. Plus I’ve really wanted to write some art directed posts on this blog to talk about a few things like SASS and RWD.

We should all read more and I feel like I should not be in front of a screen so much. There’s a real value to analog things like reading a book made out of a dead tree that doesn’t have a backlight. Sabrina and I are gonna try to read a book a month together. She’s like really good consuming a lot of books and she’s amazing, so it should be easy.

Get More Serious About Javascript & PHP

I can follow instructions on plugins and can write simple jQuery. But I can’t write Javascript well. I need to be more disciplined about learning. Working with CSS & Wordpress is great but I’d like add more interactivity to the work I do and build web applications.

I’ve kinda had a mental block about it. Jon Duckett’s book HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites was a really great way to be introduced to web design when I wanted to learn in the first place. He has this follow up book called JavaScript & jQuery: Interactive Front-End Web Development that I really wanted to get and keeps getting pushed back from the publisher. I keep saying, I’ll get started when it comes out and it was supposed to last May and it still hasn’t. A little stupid, I know, but I haven’t found a great place to start other than CodeAcademy, which is great for basic stuff but not much further.

PHP is kinda the same story, I have an idea for a database driven application I’d like to build, but I haven’t moved much further past the basics. Wordpress theming is easy and involves PHP but it’s more like template-making than it does programming.

If you know any good places to start, let me know on Twitter.

Stop Being Involved in Religious Debates

In 2013, I got really sick of the absurd deluge of just stupid conversations about Christianity. At the end of 2013, between Dave Ramsey’s stupid blog, Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism & Phil Robertson’s comments, I was sick to death of people talking about these things. I unfollowed a lot of people on Facebook and Twitter just to not hear about it.

I’m generally a lot less cynical when that stuff isn’t in my face so much. Honestly, I’ve never walked away from one of these discussions feeling like I changed someone’s mind or that I’ve gained some new perspective.

Let’s see if I can keep at some of these things.