One day, I will become rich and famous, and then I won’t keep changing my plan all the time.
Ha! Who am I kidding? Constantly changing, seeking new solutions, questing for better alternatives, considering superior plans, reinventing myself, and reimagining my processes, are central to my being. That’s who I am. If I got rich and famous, I would think of better ways to do whatever it was that finally got me rich and famous; and I would use my wealth and fame to promote superior systems for society at large; and then I would imagine better ways to *be* rich and famous, including but not limited to more socially conscious and environmentally friendly personal lifestyle alternatives, and possibly even more charitable ways to use my wealth. If I were wealthy. Which I am not, sadly. Not yet, anyhow. If I am ever rich and famous, you will know it. I won’t need to say so on my blog. In the meantime, I’m over here, always trying to chart a new course.
Today’s new course involves:
- Creating and updating my personal online portfolio
- Reinventing my company, Mardesco
Portfolio Update
Until today, my personal portfolio was my company’s portfolio. However, I’m reinventing the company, and as part of that change, I may begin freelancing under my own name, rather than contracting under my company name. Therefore, I wanted to move my portfolio from the company website to my personal professional website (that’s this site, if you couldn’t tell).
Now, the portfolio on the company website was based on a custom WordPress plugin that I had written myself, based on a Custom Post Type with custom taxonomies; and it used display templates that were integrated with my own custom WordPress theme that I had built just for that website. No, that’s not best practices for plugin development (because plugin features should be independent of the theme that displays them); but I learn as I go, and I wrote the plugin in question a few years ago. I am always learning.
So in order to properly migrate the portfolio from the company site to my personal site, I had to overhaul my custom plugin. This is one of those situations where, in order to do one thing, first you have to take a number of preliminary steps; and for each of those preliminary steps, as you dig down into the details, you discover that you have to address a number of preliminary steps for each of them, and so on and so on, in a frustrating recursion, until a project that seemed like a simple task that would only take a day or two drags on to take almost two weeks. Yes, this has happened to me before. No, I am not good at estimating how long a project will take. However, that said, I now have a totally badass custom Portfolio plugin with its own built-in display templates. If I get motivated and/or brave I may even submit it to the WordPress repository for general consumption. Please note, I have tried other portfolio plugins, and each of them left me wanting some little extra feature or other. There are many good portfolio plugins out there; but when you’re used to it doing something specific, you end up being unhappy with plugins that don’t do that one thing. In my case, it was the full-width display templates for the archive pages; I just couldn’t accept an alternative that didn’t include them. And now, I have them.
Now I still have to go through and manually update the featured images for the many, many images that for whatever reason (probably rate limiting?) failed to import from the old site when I ran the import script. But when that is done, I’ll be able to add a portfolio link to the navigation menu on this site, and then I can finally start looking for freelance work under my own name. Simple, right? Maybe not, but we do what must be done.
Reinventing the company
I’m not saying just yet what the brilliant new plan is that I have come up with for Mardesco this time, because I wouldn’t want you to steal my amazing idea. Ha! As if. But seriously folks, it’s been in the works for a while, and despite the way that looks from the outside, I am nearing the point where a relaunch will be possible.
In the meantime, the old Mardesco blog had a treasure trove of blog post content. The old Mardesco site itself was overly complex and never ranked well for anything, but the blog posts attached to it were painstakingly researched and carefully written over a period of several years. They included a number of insightful pieces about marketing, web design, brand design, and graphic design; as well as thoughts about website security, and detailed comparisons of security plugins and e-commerce plugins for WordPress. Some of the plugin comparisons are a bit dated by now but the content is, by and large, quite compelling. Compelling, that is, if you happen to have an interest in marketing, graphic design, and website development.
Anyhow, so the point is, I moved all the old Mardesco blog posts to this site’s blog. My personal site now contains all the blog posts I wrote for my business over the last, what, five years; and my business site is now a blank slate once again. Bwa ha ha! So many possibilities. Good things coming. I’ll keep you posted. Maybe.
Have a great day.