So then, here’s a fun little toy I made. For lack of a better name, I just called it Stars and put it somewhere under my RandomThink.net Labs area (which may someday get its own content management setup, which I hoped to do in EE but it’s just easier to hack on plain files for that so who knows). It needs some better documentation, but I’m sorta-working on a better version with more controls. I’ll be sure to blather on about it at that point.

I’m more apt to quickly shout about these sorts of things on Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook), so if you want to be in the know, you should maybe follow me on Twitter here or add me on Facebook here. Also worth noting, there’s an RSS feed of my tweets here, if you want to listen without being a tweeter. However, that doesn’t filter out any replies I make to others, so, y’know, you’ll be getting one side of a conversation without seeing the rest. Anyhow. Maybe I’ll install Twitter Tools to incorporate my tweets more heavily into the blog or something.

But yeah. Stars. Go play. Start the animation, then move over and hold down the mouse button somewhere for a fast spray of stars, or use the click-hold to queue up a ton of stars while not animating. Dabble a bit. Trace out your name in stars before animating and then start it up. Eventually you can put enough stars to cause some lag, but it’s really not too terrible.

As I wrote back in July, I converted my site to ExpressionEngine. I thought it’d be this great revolution for me. Instead, I just about fell off the face of the planet.

It’s not that EE isn’t a great platform — truly, it is. However, it’s a CMS. Really, it’s more of a content management framework than a CMS. However, for as much as I thought that’s what I’d do with it, to turn my site into some huge hub, it wound up kind of crippling my ability to just write.

Okay, it didn’t do that. That’s all me. However, I just felt this… this block. I didn’t like it. EE2 is a big improvement, but it’s still not quite right.

I’d also moved hosts at the time for awhile, but after doing some testing and experimenting, I found that really, DreamHost worked well for me. I even signed up for DreamHost PS, which is pretty great.

Also, upon returning, I realized I still had my old WordPress setup, still ready to go — but I didn’t just want to flip it back over. I liked the idea of at least staying in HTML5 with a clean presentation. I then explored the Carrington theme framework for WordPress. I used Carrington JAM (Just Add Markup) and basically took my EE themes and put them out into the file architecture here.

After a couple of nights and a little time, I think I’m set. I’m back in WordPress, just in time for the 2.9 upgrade. I’ve got my EE theme (courtesy of Evan for the design, my markup/CSS) in place in WordPress with the awesomeness of Carrington, and I just feel… it just feels more like home. It’s more me.

So, here goes. I’m hoping that the move back will open up my mental block a bit, and who knows, maybe I can explore Carrington a bit more in building my next theme.