The Twelve Month Plan
Creating new habits is never an easy task. Doing so takes repetition, and consistency. Most plans I’ve read suggest starting with a task for 30 days. I doubt I have much to talk about every day, so instead I’m opting for the Twelve Month Plan. One blog post, every week, for the entire year. I suppose a better name might be the Fifty-Two Week plan, but that Fifty-Two is pretty big and daunting. This way I can cross of each month as I go for smaller, more manageable goals.
I plan to blog about my continued self education of front end web development. I have a decent understanding of HTML and CSS with enough PHP to get myself around a WordPress Theme. I’ve also developed a couple custom themes for small business clients. For every step I learn, I see the next hundred beyond. While in the past this might have made me lose focus and switch to an easier task I think I am now ready to tackle what challenges me.
My goals for the year are as follows:
- Memorize HTML5 standards
- Strengthen SASS skill-set
- Learn Javascript
- Release an Open Source Theme
- Find 10 developers that I communicate with regularly
That’s a whole lot to accomplish, but I’ve got a year to get through it all. I’m sure life is going to find a way to interfere, like my wedding in late April, so I’m going to try to create a post or two early to use as filler in the busier weeks. I will do this no more than three times, and hopefully not at all.
Themeing
One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with my blog is a need to tinker with the style of the site. So I’m going to set some goals to help in this regard.
I will not change the theme of this blog for the first month of my project. This way I can focus on writing. My need to constantly adjust and play with the theme of my own site has left me unhappy with the look and then I quickly grow unhappy with the blog. I don’t want this to be the case this time. I have a couple ideas in mind of what I will be looking for and after I find the one that best suits me I wont change it for the rest of the project. Since one of my goals is to create a theme I will have a separate theme project that I will tinker with and release to the public. After a year, and the theme is hopefully complete, I’ll switch to that theme, or another of my own creation.