jonathan stegall

I’ve been a bit lazy with posting, as of late. So, I want to provide a bit of an update of what’s going on. As these things continue to develop, they may possibly provide some material for more posts. Exciting.

Projects

I have several projects that will be happening over the next few months. Currently, a new site is being created for Revolution Atlanta. Hopefully, it will continue to go well. A few other projects are also in the works, and more details will be coming about some of them.

Also, I’m finally making progress (very slow progress, albeit) on creating a design concept for this website. Yes, this blog. I know I said I might have it designed by early 2008, and I also know that “early 2008″ is almost over. So, let’s shoot for mid 2008, and see what happens. I feel very happy about the general direction things are proceeding with this design.

Issues of the spirit

Recently, I mentioned on this blog that God has been working with me concerning the issue of prayer. He has faithfully brought it to my attention, over and over again. Recently, I finished reading The Great Omission by Dallas Willard.

It is an amazing book, and through it, especially, I feel like I am beginning to see a bit of the bigger picture of what is being said to me. The book covers the kind of authentic discipleship that is typically missing from the Western church, which is essentially the kind of discipleship that Jesus had in mind for his followers. We in the Western church have entirely skipped a lot of it in favor of things that are easier and less powerful.

As he examines this kind of discipleship, Dallas Willard brings together the teachings of Jesus on how to follow him. He looks at various spiritual disciplines; how they can influence a life to authentically experience and grow in the experience of God.

The hardest, and thus probably the most relevant, issue for me to learn about was the issue of solitude and silence. Learning to practice the presence of God by spending time away from other things.

I’m not any good at this. I see the deep relationship that it has to new monasticism, especially, and other parts of emerging things that God is doing in the world. I see the deep, paradoxical relationship that it has to spiritual community.

Interestingly, as I work on a website that I hope will express who I am to the fullest extent possible, I am also beginning to see the relationship that this kind of authentic spiritual experience, leading through silence and solitude to prayer and awareness of God, has to art and creativity and design. I’m beginning to see that, the more I get of this, the better a designer I will be.

That’s not at all to say that the best designers have to care about spiritual things, or that they would be better designers if they did. But it is to say that I, personally, will be a better designer if I can better integrate my life, and better learn to slow it down and be more aware of spiritual things.

I’ve been reluctant to post these thoughts, as they’re still a bit murky. I’ve had many of these thoughts for years, but I feel as though they are beginning to work together in ways that they may not have in the past, and that leads me to believe that it’s worth posting them.

So, at long last, I have taken a couple of tentative steps in designing my own website. Yes, this website. http://jonathanstegall.com. Typically, I don’t blog about projects until they are finished, but I’m thinking I’d like to blog my way through this one. To encourage myself, and document the reasons that I do certain things and do not do certain other things, and so on.

History of jonathanstegall.com

This site has existed since I was in art school and had to create a portfolio for myself. I did so. It was not one of my best sites. It wasn’t a horrible site, but it certainly wasn’t very good. The best part about it was the fact that the entire thing (a Flash site) was controlled through ActionScript: the colors, background images, content, animation, etc. Which was fun.

Anyway. When I moved to Atlanta and got a job, I didn’t see the need for a portfolio. I don’t have a whole lot of free time, and typically I have a lot of things that I would like to be doing and don’t have time to do them. Thus, freelance isn’t a high priority, and I don’t have a whole lot of need for a portfolio. So, I turned http://jonathanstegall.com into a blog.

I enjoy blogging. I have opinions about almost everything, and I like to share those opinions. It helps me think, it helps me grow, and it even gets me a bit of random traffic from Google and Technorati and so on.

Where to go from here

So, this site is currently built in WordPress. I like WordPress. I used it a bit in art school, and have used it a bit since then on other sites. I enjoy building themes, and working with the code. I know php well enough, and enjoy it well enough, to do what I want with it. It’s extremely customizable, and extremely powerful if one knows how to make it powerful. At this point, the site is using the default WordPress theme. I haven’t changed it, mainly to motivate myself to, whenever there was time, get busy and create something for it.

Here is where it gets difficult. Designers are often their own worst clients. I have had some odd clients, but I have to agree: I am the worst. It takes me forever to know what I want, I’m rarely satisfied, and I always think I could do better. This is also part of the delay, and it’s part of the reason I want to blog my way through the process. I want to see if I emerge as a satisfied, or even close to satisfied, client of myself.

First steps

I started in a sketchbook. I like to begin websites with a sketchbook. I sketched out a basic layout and structure, and a small navigational structure. When I design layouts for WordPress, I do not treat them as though they are WordPress layouts. They are websites. They don’t need to look like they are made in WordPress, necessarily.

Then, I moved to Photoshop, and started a grey box layout. So far, so good. But then I started playing around with some colors. And that’s where I started to be a bad client. I’m not yet satisfied. We’ll see where this goes.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been hurriedly attempting to learn Ruby on Rails for a client project. Essentially, this project has involved too many requirements with too little time. So basically, I’ve been a desperate designer seeking a way to program a site with very specific requirements in as little time as possible, with as low a learning curve as possible.

I know PHP fairly well, but I don’t know any of the MVC frameworks that exist for it (Cake, Symfony, etc.) If time ever allows, or a project dictates that I do so, I may try to learn these, but for this one I thought it was wisest to go ahead and dive headfirst into Rails, and learn it as I go. So, I bought a book. This book teaches Rails through designing a social networking site.

Thus, it covers Models, Views, and Controllers in what I would consider to be significant detail. It covers migrations, database access, relationships, and so on. Toward the end, it covers REST and briefly covers scaffolding. I have heard that scaffolding will not be a part of the next full version of Rails, so I have not used it in my client project. For the most part, though, everything else that I learned was essential to the development of this site.

Observations thus far

Essentially, Rails is amazing. At this point, I’m not ready to be posting code examples, but so many things are happening so much faster and easier than they would in PHP, or .NET; which of course is the reason I’m trying it in the first place.

The slogan in the Rails community is “convention over configuration.” In .NET, and more so in Java from what I hear, one has to configure a lot of things in the initial setup of the application. In Rails, there are conventions built in so that one does not have to do this. I love this. Almost everything I have needed to do so far has a convention built into Rails that one can use to do it. My task has been to learn as much Ruby as possible, and learn where these conventions are built so that I can take advantage of them. Brilliant.

The Rails community

In PHP, there is a vibrant community. There are any number of forums where one can find help for almost any issue. Many times, i have received an error for whatever random reason, copied that error exactly, and pasted it into Google only to find out that others have had the same error, and to learn how to resolve it.

Rails isn’t there yet, or my errors aren’t there yet, but the forums have been a lifesaver. Rails Forum and Ruby Forum are full of people that have been so gracious and willing to help.

Moving forward

As this project continues, and after it’s over especially, I hope to continue learning the best practices for Rails, and to continue diving into Ruby as the programming language that powers Rails. There’s something about being on a deadline that forces me to really start learning things…

I haven’t had a chance to post on this yet, but the new version of the Underground Railroad went live last week, just before my wife and I left for Cornerstone (which, I hope to write a couple of posts about).

It’s important to note that this new site isn’t what you would call complete. New features are in the works for both long and short term development, and the site is built in such a way that it is easy to add new features and new content.

About the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is an organization that seeks to network ministries that work with underground and alternative subcultures. At this time, I know of connected ministries in the United States, Canada, and several countries in Europe. I believe there are also ministries in Asia and South America that will be added in the near future.

This illustrates the fact that underground culture is worldwide, and that God is doing things in the underground worldwide. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream is worldwide because something of a mainstream is worldwide, and there’s a unity that can be found in that.

About the website

The website of the Underground Railroad is something I’ve been privileged to be a part of since 2002, when a friend introduced me to it. This new version has been in the works for some time. Over a year, at least. For most of my time in college, I was married, working fulltime, and attending school fulltime, and didn’t have as much time to work on awesome projects like this. Since I finished college in December, my freetime went up a bit and I was able to finish the site.

In any case, I was responsible for the design and development of the new site, as well as some of the new content. Other parts of the new content are still pending, but believe me when I say it’s better that the new site be up with pending content than that the old one have lived through another Cornerstone.

As far as design and front end structure, I feel that there’s a clean, dark look for the most part, and that it’s somewhat minimalistic. Part of this is intentional, and part of it is due to the slowness that often comes with receiving graphical material from so many different sources. I intentionally avoided the use of a lot of generic stock photography, but I do hope to include relevant photos as the site continues to develop and receive input. Front end structure is generated by the back end system, and is written to be valid XHTML 1.1, with valid CSS. I’ve never done a site to the 1.1 specification, and thought I’d give it a try.

The back end is written in PHP 5, with a MySQL 5 database. As much of the PHP is object oriented as my knowledge allows, which I’ve found to be more than I thought it was. While I can’t claim that this is an MVC Content Management System by any means, I feel that it is a cleanly coded system. This is by far the biggest project I’ve done with PHP, and has proven to be quite the learning experience.

What now?

Now, there are several other projects that will begin to require attention. Some are ministry related. One of the most important to me is, again, designing this blog. Let’s hope that begins soon.

So, I’ve just recently finished a nice freelance project that allowed me to create an admin system from scratch. I used PHP/MySQL, and rather enjoyed myself learning a lot of things I didn’t know about admin systems. I’ve created a couple in the past, but never one this object oriented, or this efficient, or this powerful. So I enjoyed it, and hope it gets approved by the client. Anyway.

As I’ve noted in other posts, I’m fairly close to finishing the Underground Railroad’s redesign, and then I’ll be able to work on other things. The Underground Railroad needs to be done by Cornerstone, at the end of this month. It has a decent amount of work remaining, but I feel pretty confident I can get it done in time. It also is using PHP/MySQL, but is quite a bit more intensive, object oriented, and powerful than the admin system, simply because it’s an entire site from the ground up, rather than just the admin system.

One of the other things I intend to turn to upon finishing this, other than designing a theme for this blog, is learning Ruby/Ruby on Rails. I’ve debated with myself about whether I want to learn Ruby, Python, ColdFusion, or try to learn .net in a better way than I did in college. I feel strongly that I didn’t learn the best way of doing things that .net has to offer… whether that’s wishful thinking or not is yet to be seen. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t feel that it was the fault of the professor so much as the curriculum, as it was evolving after she took it over, and certainly did improve drastically from the point it was before she took it. Anyway. I’m not ready to deal with .net stuff again at the moment, if I ever will be, and ColdFusion is interesting, but I’m not sure where its future will take it. So, my major decision has been between Ruby and Python. I’m still not entirely decided, but I’m leaning toward Ruby.

I’ve found this hilarious guide to Ruby, and it looks like something I could enjoy working through. It has funny language, funny drawings, and appears to be teaching in a way that is easy to follow while actually learning some things about the language. So, I look forward to working through this.

In the event that visitors would like to know what is happening in my current web endeavors, I thought I would summarize current projects that are happening outside of work.

The Underground Railroad redesign

This is at least the most satisfying thing that’s currently happening. I can’t remember how long I’ve been working on this site, as there was a long period of time where I had very little spare time to do that kind of thing. Now, though, I feel like it’s a few solid weeks away from being finished. It will certainly have more room for growth and expansion and all that, but the site will be ready to go live, and hopefully without being a disappointment.

The Refuge of St Petersburg

The Refuge site has been on hold for a bit, due to the same reasons the Underground Railroad took so long. However, the benefit of spitting out the Underground Railroad will be that much of the programming is flexible enough to be reused, and get the structure and functionality I need for the Refuge. Hopefully, it will be a bit faster.

design of jonathanstegall.com

And yes, this blog. It desperately needs a design. I’ve been pushing different things about in my head from time to time, and have a few good ideas. I plan to work on this, and create a custom theme based on what I want out of WordPress, rather than basing it on an existing theme. This may cause it to take a bit longer, and I’m okay with that.

Other stuff

There are a few other projects that are either just beginning, or still floating around in the head of myself or my wife. I hope to be able to share more about these in the near future, as well.