I completed last week’s project for a couple of reasons.

First, I was trying to play catch-up with a number of things (including projects for 52 Weeks, I was one behind) and essentially I needed to choose something that I knew I would be working on anyways and something I knew I could complete. I had been working on both sites for a couple of weeks and just needed to finish them up.

Second, for a while now I have been playing around with CSS & other coding that goes beyond basic HTML and I wanted a project where I could really focus and try to actually learn about CSS rather than hacking away at code like I typically do. I was hoping that if I used Tumblr’s “bear bones” CMS system I could focus on learning CSS.

Well that didn’t happen.

In the end what I ended up doing was transforming a Wordpress theme that I really liked into a comparable Tumblr theme, and in the end I just hacked away at the CSS anyways.

Although I did not start from scratch to learn CSS and as such failed in that respect I did manage to do a couple of other things that I am happy with.

First, I managed to transfer a theme from Wordpress to Tumblr and it was much easier than I thought. In addition I was able to add some custom tweaks to the Tumblr theme that I rather liked.

Second, and more importantly, what I learned about Tumblr and the way it handles content was far beyond what I expected. I was hoping to be working with the basics of Tumblr by the end of the week; however, I ended up implementing a number of advance features that typically are only found in higher end themes. I applied so many back end features to this theme that I actually thought of working on it more and eventually releasing it as a theme (only after much more work is put into it).

As for my personal homepage, I had wanted to create a space that reflected who I am, informs people of what I do (what is it that I do?) and would be a place where potential employers, my students and members of the community could all go to find out about me.

I had wanted to start from scratch but found that a theme I had been working with for a long time lent itself well to what I wanted to achieve, with a little tweaking of course.

So in the end, although I may not have achieved my initial goal, I came away with two custom spaces that I am both proud of and think help to represent who I am and what I do (what is it I do exactly?).