I’m Stuck!

As you can tell, I haven’t been blogging for over a month now for two reasons: First, I have been busy with work, working more hours than I normally would. When home comes, I go straight to bed. Second reason, I’m simply stuck with my upcoming new theme.¹

So far, I haven’t really come up with a layout that would truly give me the real feel of an “Adriculous” blog. What I mean by this is that I haven’t really come up with a good theme layout that can “surpass” my previous old theme.² The struggle for a web developer’s block truly is real, therefore I have been going back to the basics again: searching for inspiration through anything outside the internet.

I began reading anthology books, like collections of best short stories and my 600-page original short story collection of Sherlock Holmes³ and my one and only copy of the Edogawa Ranpo⁴ collection of mysteries and chilling stories. There has been an urge to start writing another original fiction, and once again, towards the cozy mystery genre. But for another reason, just going back to reading good ol’ literature also does help my creativity get cranked up.

I also started getting into hero image mockups. I’ve downloaded (free and paid) some pre-made scene generators to do some experimenting. I’ve already built one for my (forever?) under construction portfolio. I thought about making another digital painting from one of my old photos or just grab some awesome stock photo to make digital painting out of, but wanted something more feminine, so to speak. I thought about making another hero image with just some general female stuff, but at the same time I want the items involved to be more related to me. One example would be that I would like to have the computer images to be PC⁵ and most of them have Macs in them. I am not a Mac user because obviously I don’t have one. I haven’t come up with a hero image yet, but hopefully once I finally made one, I can finally have an idea on how the rest of my site would look like.

I pondered about changing Divi for other frameworks like Genesis and then find a good editable child theme for it,⁶ but then that would mean I would have to shell out more money just for that. I even purchased a one-year subscription with Theme.Works⁷I’m also currently taking a Udemy class on making websites using the Bootstrap framework and then transform it in to a WordPress theme, as well as taking a class on learning how to build websites using Foundation 5 framework.⁸ Just yesterday, thanks to my Divi Users Facebook Group page, I discovered this and now I’m definitely going to just stick with Divi. After all, this “maintenance mode” page is already Divi in action. How cool is that. 

And lastly, and this is my fault, I have been playing too many video games as of late. I went back to playing PS3 again after months of not being active there.⁹ There have been a lot of things going on in my life that I rather not write about here, after all, blabbing out my personal life in full detail is not one of my objectives for this blog. Hopefully with this new-found confidence, I can finally do less gaming and more coding and more writing… hopefully.

I have also been doing some non-digital DIY art and craft, like origami and Zentangles. I’ve posted a few of my origami pieces in my Instagram, but I haven’t finished a single tile of Zentangle just yet, so you get none of that for the time being. I also started looking in to the new phenomenon of adult coloring books. Back to old school fundamentals so we can live our life stress-free and simply relaxed.

So far, the only “update” that I can give you regarding the progress of my new theme is using a separate plugin for a default featured image like this pink one you’re seeing right now. My previous child theme has that default images bit built-in so I didn’t have a default images plugin. Pretty soon I’ll also be having a custom signature in every single post I write here for a bit more personal touch, but I haven’t decided yet whether I should install another plugin for this signature or find some tutorial to just add a function in my functions.php file that would help me accomplish this.

The rest, we’ll just see what happens.

On the sidenote...

1. On the other hand, just this little “maintenance mode” page that I’ve got going on here is more than enough to be its own theme, but let’s move on… [↩]
2. which I really love, by the way… but new changes, and that we have to part [↩]
3. I blame my PS3 version of the Sherlock Holmes video games for this… [↩]
4. He was like Japan’s own Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. [↩]
5. if not Dell… [↩]
6. I’m still not fully trained in creating Genesis child themes just yet, but I’ve enrolled in two classes at Udemy that involves Genesis, so hopefully that would help… [↩]
7. on sale as a DealClub member at DealFuel. [↩]
8. My problem with these is that I do not have any time. [↩]
9. most especially Destiny and a bunch of other games like some Sherlock Holmes games, other jRPGs like Ni no Kuni, but most of all, as I mentioned before, stuck in PC playing The Sims 4… sigh. [↩]