Daniel R. Stewart, Graphic Designer

There will always be challenges. Why bother avoiding the inevitable? When I was making my website I wanted wordpress so I could have an easily manageable CRM that would double as a blog. Installing wordpress was the easy part. Installing a few plugins was too. Creating my own theme without knowing PHP whatsoever was a challenge.

It’s not the same as just making a web page as I have in the past with HTML and CSS. I had to learn what the PHP functions in Wordpress meant so that I could design to my specifications. For example right now you’re reading the_content(). Some were self explanatory like that whereas others (I’m looking at you, the_time(’l, F jS, Y’)) were a little less helpful.

I live in California, which has a huge spanish speaking population. Out of personal interest and to further differentiate myself from the competition, my site is completely bilingual. I studied spanish for 4 years and I’ve seen what automated translators can do so I do it myself. My spanish isn’t perfect, but it improves with constant translation of new content (like this article, for example.) I have continued my studies with continued practice with some friends from south america who are happy to oblige.

Getting everything working in a more manageable way in two languages was another challenge. Sure, duplicating the theme and then just renaming all the links would be easy. I could’ve just had the spanish version of my site be danielrstewart.com/espanol and essentially maintained two different versions of the site, having to ensure that all information was up to date. Having to make sure that my portfolio was correctly updated in english as well as spanish, and then writing new articles on the english site then going back to the spanish one to rewrite it. In the short run this is easy as this site is very young. In the long run, it would be a pain, and I refused that.

I chose the challenge instead. I tied everything to XLanguage, the language switcher I use. It took some time to get working, but it was worth it. Instead of having to manage two sites, I can see everything in either language. When I write articles I write them in english and in spanish, marking one for english, the other for spanish. Now all comments are on the same page regardless of what language you’re viewing it in. Go ahead, leave a comment and then change the language. Your comment is still there.

This is my new challenge. I remember bits and pieces from when Flash seemed like Macromedia Director on steroids, but it’s come a long way. I dedicate time everyday to educate myself with it, and I aim to be able to use it for most things I would imagine myself doing with it by the end of this year. I’ve heard from friends who use flash that the new version 3.0 of their scripting language Actionscript is more similar to an object-oriented programming language than for scripting. Since I have some experience with C and Java from high school, I suspect that will be comfortable for me to understand. After flash there is a never-ending list of new things I want to learn, to do.

Is there a challenge that you have overcome that you’d like to share? A challenge you’ve committed to? Let yourself be heard by leaving a comment.

Filed under: advice