One of my favorite signs in the NYC subway system is the one that reads "Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards."  My real favorite is "If you see something, say something", but that's for another day.  The "backwards" sign goes on to explain that, in some stations, in order to reach a platform for the train on the other side without leaving the station, you need to go against the direction you want to go to reach a station that allows you to transfer to the correct platform, and thus, the correct train.

Well, that's where I find myself; going backwards to go forwards.  Somewhere around Chapter 7 of my book, I realized that I was not learning as much as I was hoping to.  I was learning to recreate pretty much the specific thing the book was instructing me to do, but I wasn't learning much of the why or the how.  With a goal of being able to write my own unique apps, I need to understand a bit more context to what I was doing.

I've now taken a step back, and am reading a book that takes a much more beginner's approach than the "Beginning" book I started with.  It's going to slow my project down considerably.  And I'm fully expecting to see iPhone 4.0 and the iPad (ordered mine today) both come out before I can write an iPhone 3.0 app.  But if I ever have hopes of writing for those platforms, I need a better understanding of the language.

Here I am, hoping on the subway train going in the opposite direction of where I want to be.  Not to take the metaphor too far, but hopefully I catch an express train at the next stop.

Made a good bit of progress on the site tonight.  Most of it shows in the theme, which is a bit more fleshed out.  Side note: I am constantly confused by 'fleshed/flushed out' and 'coming down the pike/pipe'.  Images should now accompany most posts, like this one of a dude unimpressed with the importance of the ribbon cutting ceremony.

I dare to say that this site is actually 100% useable now.  That means I need to turn some of my attention to other projects, most notably, Project Code Grasp.

Two new key pieces: 1) From a project update page, you can now view the project teaser in the upper right. 2) From a project page, you can see a list of project updates. These are two key pieces that are getting me close to the point that I'm going to have to do some theming to get these elements to look good, rather than just making them function. I've also given the site a theme: I'll be using a custom subtheme of Sky, a simple but nice design.

It took a little while, but I got the key modules for my project presentation working. They include: NAT: Automatically creates a matching term in the 'Project' taxonomy every time I create a new project Pathauto: Creates URLs based on projects, both for the projects and their updates (updates appear in "subdirectories" of projects) Taxonomy Redirect: Redirects from taxonomy terms to nodes. This allows auto-created taxonomy terms for each project to redirect directly to the project page I also got the two new content types (project, project update) created in their most basic states.