I have, perhaps, spent the last month thinking about how to redesign and organize my little space, here on the web. In that mean-time, I put up a couple of different temporary home pages, which were made simply to amuse myself. While those did the job of holding down the fort, I went to work redesigning.

A good chunk of my time was spent building a custom blog solution written in PHP, to use as a non-bloated replacement for WordPress. I got as far as a fully-functioning simple blogging system before I realized that I really don't want to have to recode all of the features that WordPress already has. The blog posting bit is fairly straightforward, but I realized I really didn't want to have to deal with comments, spam, categories, and all that other good stuff WP already does.

So instead, I set out to learn how to design my own custom WP layout themes. Although it’s just a lot of PHP commands, so to speak, there really is a lot going on behind the scenes in WP. I really didn't want to have to learn another "language" to program in, so I stuck with the basics – displaying posts, comments, organizing categories – and I'll slowly upgrade my theme as I find more things I desire.

That brings us to what you are looking at now (probably, unless I've changed it again): my ultra minimal, [mostly] grayscale, two column WordPress theme, custom designed exclusively for use at jstnryan.com. I rather like it.

I'm used to opening notepad.exe (well, actually it’s been PSPad for a while now..) and typing what I want. It is an arduous process somtimes; I have to explicitly state when I want the line to break, when I want something bold, but I like that control. It makes me feel good. I'm not sure how I'll adjust to inputing my ideas into an in-browser psuedo-WYSIWYG editor (if you can even call it that). Thankfully, I see an "HTML" tab subtly peeking at me; perhaps it’s an input that lives on the wilder side of tags and code, an area that I'll definitely have to try out with my next post. I'm saved!