As I feel happens to any good developer, the work you perform on a day-to-day basis is more often than not applying existing skills to legacy applications. That is to say, your day job is not constantly updating technology.
In order to stay current, and relevant, there's got to be time you spend on projects that take you out of your daily work's stack. To try and achieve this, I'm going to take an existing application I've got in production storesdowntown.com . Often the most difficult hurdle to jump in a project like this, which is done mostly for educational purposes, is the idea of what application to build. Using something that already exists makes things easier and has the added benefit that I'll end up with an upgraded site.
I'll also document the whole thing here; it's primarily for my notes, but if making them public helps someone else, or brings a valuable opinion from a peer, then that's great.