Okay. So I took a break.. but I came back swinging. Today has been a brutally long day, and I plan to do some more after a snack break… but I am FINALLY feeling really good about where I am on the site. I am still about a day behind where I wanted to be, but I still believe I can get the whole thing done by Sunday afternoon. Barring any disaster, that is.

So: Today’s highs:

• I figured out how to eliminate the need to edit 47 separate template files just to fix a small thing in the header of the site. Now I only need to edit 8 files. It only took 2.5 hours of work to get it there.
• Got the forums styled and set up.
• Figured out how to customize the login screen to look really snazzy.
• I’m down to 140 posts to edit. (and maybe 3-4 pages)
• I managed to at least get an outline of topics necessary for my “about me” and “home” sections.
• Added more links to the link library, but not as many as I wanted to.
• I found a new favorite song! The lyrics really really spoke to me. (If you’re curious, it’s “Clearly Lost” by the band Barenaked Ladies – off their newest album, which I hadn’t bothered to fully listen to until today…)

Today’s lows:

• I had HOPED to get to 70 posts left. Didn’t happen.
• I had hoped to have time to set up “welcome” posts for each forum board, but didn’t.
• Struggling to figure out how to lower the workload for header fixing for an hour before having the stroke of brilliance that the tutorials I watched should have already clued me into.
• Didn’t have time or brain power to actually WRITE the about me sections yet.
• Coming to the realization that I may or may not have time to add as much to the link library as I had hoped before launch. I feel like this, unfortunately, has to be put as my lowest priority for now, because I can easily do it after launch. I do, at least, have a bare minimum of at least one link per category, so the whole page works as intended, which is all it really needs at this point.

Past all that, things are, as I said, looking quite good. No major breaks of the templates in the last few days, it appears I have fixed all that.. and today’s header debacle has done what I should have done weeks ago, as well as gotten the templates into what I considered as a “finished” state. Can’t really complain. However, it is now “lunch” time, since I forgot to eat earlier… oops. At least I have a tasty turkey and muenster cheese sandwich waiting for me in the fridge!