Sometimes I find myself torn between wanting to write and wanting to just play around in geeky, developer stuff all day, and today was definitely one of those days.

Of course, the dev projects that I have to work on aren’t exactly the types that I felt like working on today … so I suppose you could argue that I really just wanted to dabble in inconsequential and unnecessary geek stuffs today, which in the end isn’t really very productive for anybody! 😛

A couple of smaller issues that I needed to fix were WordPress issues that arose from my being lazy and not using child themes like you’re supposed to, thus resulting in the loss of some custom code that I’d written that subsequently got overwritten by various theme updates. And in dabbling with these, as is often the case I found myself wandering back to the realm of WordPress optimization – something that can be fairly important, but honestly my sites are more or less fine for the minimal traffic they get now and they’d really need to start seeing a bunch more for me to even test and troubleshoot the next options on the list…

One of my long-term dreams is to have a huge, fancy flat panel in my office that just cycles through active server stats and pageviews to show how all of my sites are performing in real-time – kind of like how you can see real-time hits with Google Analytics today. I just love the idea of hits popping up on the map all around the world representing people actively reading my work, but at this point it’s hard to justify the expense of a giant TV that’s going to be sitting idle waiting for web traffic with my readership as it stands today. 🙁

I think I need to find a mid-sized, but not ridiculously intensive dev project for days like this where it doesn’t have a strict deadline to get finished, but checking off bits and pieces of it over time will help to move me towards that goal.

Maybe revisiting some of those optimization ideas, but on a more lax approach would be a good start…