ShawnIngram.com

Tuesday’s Topic - Focus: Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Focus Gone…

Posted by Shawn

A good friend, Jen Goode, gave me a laugh today when I saw her thread in a newsgroup that we both belong to for her Tuesday’s Topic… Focus… Focus? What is that? It’s been so long since I’ve had any, I had to go look the word up! There were so many different meanings to the word between noun and verb, not to mention different types of verbs, that I almost lost focus and forgot about finishing this post! *rolls eyes*

Seriously though, focus is something that I am in a constant struggle with. I’m one of those folks who are constantly thinking. New ideas popping into my head at a constant rhythm. At times there are so many ideas that I haven’t had time to turn into action that the rhythm drops totally out of key and starts to sound like a chorus of one year olds banging on mom’s kitchenware with the largest cooking utensils they can hold!

For example.. Yesterday… I started the day opening up Dreamweaver to clean up some code in my CafePost plug-in to be able to adapt the administration portions to my other plug-ins which have been on the backburner for way to long (I should have focused on them long ago.. lol).. I start going through the code and I run across an IF statement for the excerpt processing and get distracted into fixing the except portion of the code.. As I’m fixing the excerpt code I run across a page talking about fixing WordPress themes to support widgets (which the theme I switched to here does not, but now soon will if I can get to focus on fixing it..) So I start digging into my theme’s code and decide that instead of hardcoding the ads into the theme, I want to use the wp-ads plug-in in order to get ad rotation and balancing.. So I go into one of my affiliate networks and start adding ads to wp-ads and decide that instead of doing that for every one of the websites in the ShawnIngram.com network of websites that I want to initially load the ads for all my partnered merchants here at ShawnIngram.com and then import them into the other site databases from here. So I get distracted from loading ads from the other three networks I belong to and start trying to figure out how to export just the wp-ads stuff. Off and on all through this, I am skimming through various “How to draw manga” type books trying to get a grasp on the techniques to draw characters to illustrate my sites. I’m also thinking of how to include the illustrations into my layouts . At the same time, I’m trying to figure out how to use CSS in different ways along with the illustrations and to eliminate old html tables. Thoughts of things to add to the myNicheShop plug-ins I am trying to develop are also struggling for mind time along with thoughts of changing the database/post interaction for CafePost and myNicheShop plug-ins… Talk about a focus train wreck..

So today, once I finish this post, my day will once again start off with the goal of opening up Dreamweaver to clean up the code of CafePost to adapt the administration portions to my other plug-ins.. With luck, and some focus… Maybe I’ll make more progress before getting distracted today. Out of all the things I started to work on yesterday, I think the only thing I finished was lunch.. :p

So here is to Jen and her Tuesdays Topic. May focus be with each and every one of us.. At least for today. lol

NOTE: Jen’s Tuesday’s Topic post about focus can be read here!