dilemman :(also delemon or de-lemon) Going through a dilemma on what to do with your website and coming to the startling realization the your website is a complete lemon and you need to pretty much scrap it and start over.

In my recent campaign to start marketing myself properly I really took a thorough look at how my website presents and represents me and my services. At first, I considered the my custom WordPress theme (the design and certain aspects of how the website functions). I felt I didn’t really have time to build my own theme from scratch, and that I ought to get a head start with a good basic theme that I can customize later. Assuming the current WordPress default theme, TwentyEleven, would probably include all of WordPress’ latest features and serve as a good “basic” otherwise, I looked into that one first. I was impressed and I flew with it. Great! Much time saved– I didn’t even have to search around. It was even HTML5 with some CSS3. I made minimal changes to it and moved.

Then I started taking a look at improving my portfolio.

Challanges
I wanted/needed my portfolio to:

• Be semantically practical
• Be made with Unobtrusive javascript
• Use only jQuery (and plugins) for javascript
• Be Smartphone compatible
• Flip like the Photos app on iPhones (or at least display image collections the way Google Images does on iPhone)
• Link portfolio images to the relevant blog post where I would present the item (be it an illustration, website, etc.)
  OR allow comments on the image as well as a link in case I wanted to elaborate
• Show up in a feed based on a category as well as an overall feed for all portfolio images
• Look really cool
• Be built entirely with plugins since I don’t have a lot of time to figure out how to program all of this stuff

I tried for about a week to make it all work, and then I woke up. What was I think?! Nobody cares how pretty my online portfolio is. No, I still want to achieve all of that, but it’s not a high priority, right?

So I finally dropped that, realizing it was time to dig through my old posts and pages to see what could be reused, what could be recycled and what needed to be sent to the local land fill. As it turned out, I only had a small handful of posts that were any good. Only one of my posts (a recent one) presented actually production and almost all the rest of them were me trying to be the expert on a subject— providing no sources for any of it (don’t try this at home). The Internet is loaded with these basics on web development anyway. Why should I try to write it all over again?

Hence the bareness of my website and the probable delusion that I’m a rookie who has yet to begun blogging.