Sometimes I have bonkers story ideas. And sometimes those bonkers ideas need to… germinate.<\/p>\n
In July I had one of those ideas. It was a neat hook, but where does one go<\/i> with it? I batted it around, I tried a couple of different angles, and earlier this week I figured out how to crack it.<\/p>\n
I put a thousand words down on the story this morning and afternoon. I’m the worst judge of these things, but I feel<\/i> that I’m over the halfway point. I reached a good stopping point. I’ll look at it again in the morning.<\/p>\n
Then, I took a look at something I’d scribbled on the subway yesterday morning. Instead of reading VALIS<\/i><\/a>, I sketched out a website design.<\/p>\n It’s not for me. Well, not exactly<\/i>.<\/p>\n At work earlier in the week one of my coworkers said, “How would you feel about picking up a blog for work?” It was a throwaway thought, a “What if we did this?” sort of thing, and I filed the thought away in the back of my mind.<\/p>\n What occurred to me Thursday night on the commute home was the idea was good, but not a great<\/i> idea. I mean, it had potential, but blogging on its own — particularly the suggested topic — wouldn’t actually draw<\/i> anyone. There are people already blogging that particular topid — and doing it better than I probably could, to be honest.<\/p>\n What I came up with, on that subway ride home, was how to make<\/i> the idea great.<\/p>\n I wrote down the three things that I felt a potential work blog should accomplish:<\/p>\n In short, it shouldn’t exist simply for the sake of existing.<\/p>\n What I realized was that a traditional blog structure wouldn’t work for this. This was more of a content-management project with the trappings<\/i> of a blog. More like a magazine, less like a blog. But still with blog-like features.<\/p>\n Friday morning, I sketched out on the subway a design. I liked it. It had featured articles. It had subarticles. It was divided up in an easy-to-understand fashion.<\/p>\n This afternoon, with the words down on the short story, I decided to switch gears and work on this project some more.<\/p>\n I found a free CSS template that was almost<\/i> what I wanted. I spent some time reworking the HTML the template worked with to give me something closer to what I had sketched out. I’d sketched out four columns at the bottom. This had three columns at the bottom. I was okay with the three columns.<\/p>\n Then, when I was mostly<\/i> happy, I began turning this HTML\/CSS template combo into a WordPress theme.<\/p>\n It’s mostly finished. I have still to write the page.php file, and then I’ll upload it to my server and see if it works. I think it will. I’m feeling confident.<\/p>\n It’s a tech demo. Proof of concept. Other buzzwords, too.<\/p>\n And then we’ll see if my idea works. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes I have bonkers story ideas. And sometimes those bonkers ideas need to… germinate. In July I had one of those ideas. It was a neat hook, but where does one go with it? I batted it around, I tried a couple of different angles, and earlier this week I figured out how to crackContinue reading “On Writing and Bloggery”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[4096,4124,4102],"class_list":["post-1949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-wordpress","tag-work","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n