The Wilson Project

And Now This Message From The Author…

Sorry for the three month delay. Usually reasons: work, personal, and fencing. I would say that nothing has changed but that would be a bold-faced lie. As a matter of fact, more things will be changing in the next six months than the last year.

Writing

• Finally starting work on The Information Layer, with the first part ready Saturday, August 6th.
• Writing a few more blog entries for CDG, one this month
• One very important blog entry for TWP this month, currently writing now

Conferences

Going to a number of events during the last couple of months of this year. Two of the most important are in the month of October:

• jQuery Conference in Boston (October 1-2. 2011)
• An Event Apart DC (October 24-26, 2001)

Exhibitions

In short, been really too busy to go any art exhibitions in the last couple of months. However, there are a few that I am trying to get to before they close in September.

• Designing Tomorrow (National Building Museum, Washington, DC) – about the world’s fairs in 1930′s
• Talk to Me (MoMA, NYC, NY) – design exhibit about interaction between objects and people
• The Allure of the Automobile (Portland Art Museum) – automobile design during the last century
• The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art (Vancouver Art Gallery) – various works from the Surrealists

Work

As I mentioned before, many things will change. How much/what kind will be detailed more in the next TWP blog entry, called “A Love Letter.”

Indirectly, eventhough Project Charles ended in April, the Delta version of this site will be completed by the end of the year (if nothing else drops from the sky…).

Fencing

Well, fencing will be…fencing. Practice three times per week, one competition per month. Still working out the schedule for 2011-2012 season.

Music

Due to my work schedule, missed out on attending Met’s performance of Berg’s Wozzeck. However, looking at the 2011-2012 schedule, will be marking my calendar for the following operas:

• Satyagraha – Philip Glass opera about Ganhdi (November 2011)
• The Makropulos Case – Leoš Janáček opera, based on a story by Karel Čapek (May 2012)

Apart from the classical scene – Elbow comes to DC in September (Yeah!!!)

That is that I have for the next couple of months…

And yes, I will be taking a vacation. Back to the PNW (Portland, OR/Vancouver, Canada) for my birthday.

What’s that sound? That’s the sound of my Google Calendar crying like a baby…

Tagged as Canada, Charles/TWP, conference, fencing, jquery, music, NYC, opera, Portland, TWP, Vancouver, web development.

Endgame

After two years this month, I have decided to end Project Charles in April. This will also mark the 10th anniversary of The Wilson Project.
Mar 14 (Twitter)

Depending on the ever changing schedule, Project Charles will be ending this year, if not sooner. After a long two years, I should be happy.

I'm exhausted.

I've carried this thing around, weathering all the stuff that gets thrown at me in the course of human life. This project became the internal motor of change, reflection, and experimentation. And a number of people have really benefitted from the results.

The basis of Project Charles was redesigning The Wilson Project with the state of the art techniques in front-end development. No, we are not talking about the dazzling canvas experiments and all the fireworks. It was about learning all this new stuff to be able, like an experienced chef, to use this wider pallette to improve their work. Well, I'm still doing that. But Project Charles brought about an urgency to the process.

Well, that urgency has come full circle. It's at a point where this project needs to end in order to go further on with other things. And since The Wilson Project Site is a working blog (and soon-to-be) portfolio site, I needed to end this thing to start doing new projects. And basically, I just need this monkey off my back. So why am I writing this blog entry?

Because I feel that the need to apologize [to myself].

This project was started with the idea of using XSLT via Symphony CMS. It's a very interesting application that I am sure will grow and improve. The cast of characters over there are currently working on the third version as I am writing this.

Now, I'm in a time crunch. I cannot, at this time, learn XSLT and learn a new CMS without some focused time and effort. Unfortunately, considering the numerous hiatus periods in this project, that will never happen. So I took the hard choice and decided to move the project back to WordPress to speed up completion. I'm relieved at be removed of this burden. But I also feel sad, as I made some sort of bad compromised to complete this project. I know I shouldn't, but I'll live. I may feel bad for not completing the project in the way that I wanted fully but I have to move on.

The other reason for Project Charles was conceptual. The "residue" of studying and observing the work around me of interaction design and front-end development. Yes, I have a few ideas that I've squirrel away.

It's called The Information Layer.

Ideally, Charles would have been the best demo, especially with Symphony/XSLT. But with the external changes of the last two years, there is a real need to share something now and not wait further down the road for an actual demo model.

So, I'm shipping now. Everything can wait.

I need my life back.

Tagged as Charles/TWP, CSS, CSS3, Design, front-end, html, html5, TWP, web development, WordPress, xhtml.

Plymouth

After months of delay, progress is finally speeding along. The graphic comps now becoming full-fledged X/HTML5 templates.

Presenting initial set of templates – http://www.deltatwp.com/plymouth/

Note: these have not been sufficently tested on IE8-6 browsers. Hopefully, these templates will be finalized by next month.

Tagged as Charles/TWP, CSS, CSS3, html, html5, javascript, TWP, xhtml.

Call Me Regent (or What’s In A Name?)

Next week, I am going to move this site to Linux server.

Not a hard process – its just a little more complex in my case since it will involve domain(s) names, file transfers, and dealing with Linux/Window server (well if you dealt with both you know what I mean). But since I am here and I made an important decisions two weeks ago, I might as well talk about it.

The “it” being…what’s up with the name “Charles”?

Click here – Table/Site Versions

The name Charles refers to Charles Darwin, whose bicentennial was in 2009, the same year the project started in March. It also added some inspiration because of the introduction of new ideas and concepts that slowly gestated and altered during the course of the project.

But the best thing about working on these projects is that it is sort of like my own research lab. It is where I get to try out new ideas before doing in the real world.

One part research scientist, one part Olympic athlete.

As for this version, I decided two weeks ago to name this version “Regent” because of its transitory nature. Unlike “H3”, it was never meant to be a final version and was always going to be more of a functional placeholder for the upcoming Charles.

And there it is.

Tagged as Charles Darwin, Charles/TWP, CSS, CSS3, html, html5, TWP, ui, web development, WordPress, xhtml.

Mental Steeplechase / Hurdle IA

After a some thought and some revisions, I decided that the homepage will take on the blog lister template. This caused the following changes in the primary navigation:

1. Changed primary navigation with addition of “Home” link
2. Changed “Information” with “About”
3. Replacement of “Blog” (main blog page) with “Blog Links” (gray section below containing Blogroll, Archives, and Meta)
4. Switched order of “Social Media” and “Blog Links”

An additional change was the addition of the site byline to the header.

As of today, this was the final substantial change to the look and feel of the Charles site. After almost a year and three concepts, Charles has its look and now I can move forward toward Charles’ completion in 1/1/2011.

Next steps:

1. Complete HTML5 code templates
2. Move TWP site from Windows to Linux server
3. Start initial steps/planning for CMS configuration

Tagged as Charles/TWP, Design, front-end, TWP.

Mental Steeplechase / Hurdle I

First screenshots of Delta TWP “Charles” site (with the exception of the homepage)

Tagged as Charles/TWP, Design, front-end, TWP.

Charles is One Year(s) Old

Actually, he’s a few weeks older, but who cares.

I knew that it had been awhile until I started writing again in the Moleskin notebook I carry around. I wish I could say more but there was some much happening outside of the project that nothing was really done for about six months. Thankful, work has started again. In this case, I took a different tack and worked around what I do best: building and programming. So far, by using prototyping (IxD idea) to try out some of the ideas in the initial plans, I made some progress and new changes that should be an improvement down the road.

A shout out to Todd Zaki Warfel for some much need inspiration.

There is still a lot of work to think about and more concepts to play around with. I’m even examining a few ideas from almost five years ago because of one change that needed to be made for better functionality, which some refresher in PHP programming (long time…).

As for the new design, that is still on hold. Finally asked another designer but he is busy as well (and just like me, can’t complain). But with the change in plans, that will wait until all the concepts have been played out.

So basically, more work, changing ideas, better direction – which leads to a more upbeat tone about the project.

BTW – Why the name Charles? I’ll tell all the worth while secrets when this is finally over, hopefully before 2011.

Tagged as Charles/TWP, TWP, web development.