Sharpen the Skills (or get new ones)

I've been very focused on some personal projects the past few weeks, which is why it's been a bit quieter here than usual. There's only so much time during a day, and only so much of that time can be used for personal things—which is normal.

But, with the refocusing of my design identity under Proteus Creative, I've started to bring my skills in web design and content management systems more up-to-date. I've been working with concrete5, a CMS I recently ran across. I was impressed very early on with its ease of use, its ability to add content per "block" live and on each page, and its mentality of "it should just work". Having with some CMSs, some of which can be very cumbersome, concrete5 strikes me as lightweight, flexibla, and easy to program. I've decided to use it for both my new websites, the future Proteus Creative site, and a yet-unnamed art website for my personal works and writing that is currently in process. I'm using the art website as a testing ground to learn c5, and then apply those newfound skills to a more considerable project, Proteus Creative.

However, learning a new CMS is no small task. And the major disadvantage I have is that I do not know JavaScript nor PHP. I can use them and implement them as scripts in my HTML files, but when it comes to manipulating them I'm at a loss. The thing about c5 is that it is extremely new in the CMS neighborhood, which has no shortage of competitors. Though it was a private system used by its makers to provide clients with an easy-to-use management system for years (it's in its fifth version, technically), c5 suffers greatly from a lack of templates and a lack of functionality that systems like Joomla and Drupal simply have a crushing weight of, due to their years of open-source development. Thus, for me, a working web designer who has some gaps in his skill set, I cannot depend on a large pool of components, extensions, etc. to do my bidding. In the end, I will be learning how to implement, probably even create, my own c5 "blocks" (concrete's version of adding functionality to a website like video players, forums, etc.). This means that I will be learning Javascript and PHP.

Of course, this is not a bad thing. If c5 not only avails me with a client-friendly CMS, but also forces me to learn the things I should've known all along, all the better. But it's one of those things that would be worthy of multiple days to learn in-depth—a completely new language like JS or PHP. It makes sense, however, as the whole idea of Proteus is not limited to XHTML/CSS—the idea is to create a methodology that uses all languages and capabilities—whatever's necessary, really—to make an attractive and interactive user interface for web-based applications and sites. My opinion now is that websites are no longer static pages—they are, in the typical sense of the word, applications—things you apply to your life as tools to further your function as a human being. Especially things like Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and YouTube—these are all applications in the sense that they are not static sources of information, but are particular to "you" and your needs/preferences. The only difference between them and Photoshop is that they use the nature of the internet to their advantage, using the information present in the "cloud" to create a dynamism an application that is just on your computer cannot present.

I would not be surprised in XHTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript become the languages of a sort of "cloud computing" operating system. These things are already being used both by servers and computers—the connection between things like websites and dashboard widgets that live on your computer, and may or may not be connected to a website, are just a hint. They're probably not the UNIX of the cloud computing operating system, but these are the languages that are making the current web UI's what they are, and it would be unwise to think that I could survive in the long run without understanding them and their capability.

So it's exciting. But there's a lot of learning to do. I try to pick at it a little bit each day, working towards the goal of implementing the things I want to see into my new personal/work websites, which will then be the stepping stone into using them in a professional production environment. And even though it may be frustrating, especially givent that when I go through these "redesign phases," I can have the expectation for myself that the site(s) will be done in the course of a day or two. That's certainly not the case here—try a month or two. But despite the frustration, I know that I'm learning a ton at each step. It's the drinking from the firehouse method, but I tend to never dip into things feet-first anyway.