Despite all the forward progress I’ve made so far, there are plenty of other items on my to-do list. One of the hardest parts of this blog project was actually to say, “screw it, just launch” despite all the little things I hate and immediately want to change about it. I assume much of the site will look pretty different as the weeks progress and I begin adding features and tweaking design elements.

The next steps will involve things both on the front end and behind the scenes. What you won’t see are my attempts to improve security and search engine optimization or to provide RSS compatibility. I’ll also be deploying Google Analytics and looking into other options to try and regain some of the valuable analytics information that WordPress had been providing.

On the front end, my next project is to put together a way of tracking progress during my trip (I’m in the midst of a 12,000 mile motorcycle journey through the CONUS). A lot of people have asked me how to follow along and so I will be building the ability to track that and integrate it with the rest of the blog (pictures and posts). I will also set up Disqus to power my comments and will implement various social sharing widgets. Stay tuned.

My next set of explorations into more formal learning will be to dive back into Javascript and the JQuery libraries. I want to learn AJAX fundamentals and build some features with the new HTML5 and CSS3 toolkits. I expect these things to crop up in various ways over the next few months. I am also starting to poke my nose a bit more into mobile development and pull together specs for an app that I’d like to create. And, as always, there is Rails somewhere down the road”¦ is it worth diving into?

The more my toolkit grows, the more cool stuff I want to build and learn. This is fun.