I am beginning to realize that I spend a lot of time on academics in my life. I have 18 credit hours this semester. 18 hours does not translate to just 18 hours per week, it is around double that for proper preparation and work on various assignments. I spend more time than I probably should just checking up on my courses and watching for signs of activity in my online courses, and not the mention the amount of time I spend working on GITI.
I have many times delayed the writing of the code to make my personal portal idea become a reality. I have all but abandoned work on Site Engine itself, and any hope for GITI side management components for it is lost. I have let this type of thing happen to too many of my personal projects. I give more attention to academics than they need. If I can make A’s in all of my courses and pretty much feel like I could do it in my sleep, then there is a problem when I am spending all of my time on it.
I really want to write my personal portal soon, and am planning to spend time this week working on it, at least to get a moderate level of functionality. I have been using my status page as a test ground for many of the concepts and ideas for the portal. The portal will be a lot more verbose and integrate more of myself into it. Looking back to the original plans for using SiteEngine for the portal (http://curtis.kularski.net/SiteEngine.html) I feel like my goals have changed some, and that my original plans were too wide. I do not want to put EVERYTHING together all at once. I do not know entirely what I really do want to accomplish with it, but I do know that I want to add the authentication functions that I originally planned for. Biographical stuff about myself will come in last for this site. I have given thoughts to doing things like adding the file drop stuff to the site as well.
In my present vision for the portal, DisturbingThoughts takes center stage, as my primary blog. I have considered the possibility of integrating all of the blogs into a single feed for the site (based on group-authentication). Also in that vision, things like my Flickr feed and Del.icio.us bookmarks will be present. Almost all aspects of my online presence will come together in an overall summary of recent content. However, there will not ever be any complete loss of the site’s original identity and completeness as a result of the portal existing (exception is Status).
I have a lot of work to do if I want to reclaim my personal desires.