As I was developing the first post for the IDEAS series I realized that due to some technical constraints my first idea was actually not such a great idea.
Furthermore, I happened across a site that had built a product near identitcal to what was going to be my third idea post: A classifieds theme. I didn’t see a need to pursue writing about it anymore since it was already available in its finished state; so that left me with one more idea.
I’ve read that if you have an idea to never search the topic on Google. I assume the reason being to not let the fact that twenty other people have not only had the idea but have already impletented it get you down.
Random remembered advice notwithstanding, I searched the internet for the last remaining idea on which I had planned to write. I didn’t find the idea implemented exactly the way I would have, but I did find a couple examples that build a general picture of it.
Archives Theme Page
The idea was to create an archives page that – easily dropped into an existing theme – was abstract, generic and beautiful enough to where many people would want to use it, but wouldn't grow undesirable as more and more implemented it.
You could either create it as a plugin or you could just setup an archives.php file that would be ready to add to any theme. You could even go so far as creating a child theme that included only an archives.php file (and of course the required style.css file).
The driving design force behind this idea was to use info-graphics similar to those created in the A List Apart article, Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards, to present a broad overview of your archives in a way that was easy accessible and fun to interact with. There are a few plugins that implement specialized archives if you'd like to explore this further.
Sputtering
So this concludes my IDEAS series a bit prematurely and with a lot less bang than I had anticipated. Though I feel that this is what I deserve for announcing a post series without having written any of it prior to the announcement!