I easily could spend 8 hours a day blogging. There’s just too much to write about; I don’t know how people like Andrew Sullivan and Warren Ellis write so much. No, wait, I do: they’re paid to write, dang it, where I am paid to make search engines smell better and must squeeze my writing in around the margins.
Recently I started work on redesigning the templates for the Library, and in my giant Mongo death Todo list I have an entry “blog updates to library”. But I never got around to writing the article, because I kept on getting confused about what to write first.
Then I realized that’s part of my problem. The point of blogging the redesign of the Library was to expose the thought process that normally goes into the redesign of any web site, rather than hiding all of the hard work behind the covers, springing it fully formed onto the world, and proclaiming: “See! Doesn’t it smell better?”
So here’s the thought process that was blocking me from writing articles on the Library:
- Anthony looks at Todo list, sees entry “Blog Update” and tries to figure out what to do with this horribly underspecified action item with no clear next action. Somewhere out in cyberspace, David Allen kills himself, then spins in his grave.
- Anthony decides “I’ve got a prototype for the new design of Library now! I just need to post the darn thing and get on with it!”
- Anthony starts work on cleaning up his Blogger template. During this process he finds he needs to figure out precisely what his Blogger template is doing, as he no longer remembers and the code is poorly documented.
- Anthony comes up with a clever way of visualizing how his Blogger template works which itself is probably worth blogging about.
- Then Anthony realizes that he doesn’t know whether the design works well with Internet Explorer on Windows, or Chrome, or on small screens (notwithstanding my desire to support only large screens), or on super large desktop screens with different sized fonts.
- This leads to more questions: What browsers should this work well on? How should I test this? What if there are fundamental incompatibilities between IE and Firefox?
- Well, shazbot. I decide, screw it, let’s just fix a small page somewhere and update that. So I update the Research page, which already needed an overhaul of its research statement.
- Anthony finds a system to help him test and prototype his content which is worthy of blogging about in its own right.
- The textual update goes swimmingly, but updating the CSS and HTML proves more of a bear, especially comparing Internet Explorer and Firefox.
- Anthony’s system for updating the content starts to show failures which are worthy of blogging about in their own right.
- Well, shoot, now what do I do?
At this point, I have about half a dozen things to blog here: updating the Library, updating the Library’s blogger template, issues with Internet Explorer and Firefox, issues with HTML and CSS, how to update your software, how to test your software, how to rapidly prototype, and how you can visualize changes to a template. So in the process of deciding to update my blog template, I accumulated far more things to blog, which at the start of this process I’d wanted to wait until after updating my blog template. I become totally confused.
But the point of this blogging exercise is NOT to go off and hide and try to figure these things out, then come back smiling with a solution. Instead, when I get stumped, that is a serious decision point in the development process and I’m SUPPOSED to write an article which says, here’s what’s on my plate, and boy did I get stumped.
So this is that article. And just articulating the things going through my mind gave me a sequence of things to do: now I can blog each of the elements on that list and show how I encountered the problem, how I tackled it, and how I got to a solution.
-Anthony
