< December 2003 >
A cautionary tale of the perils of procrastination and blogging. (16th December 2003)
Blogging has become something of a lower priority for me at the moment, nevertheless I still intend to keep going with it, the biggest barrier to my success revolves around my having a bad case of the NIH syndrome, coupled with the need to satisfy a somewhat mammoth personal wish list when it comes to creating my own personal blogging software.
I could have settled with moveable type or similar, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Professionally I have developed a number of content publishing sites, as well as a variety of highly complex "web apps", so technical skill isn't the problem. (I could use PHP, ASP, ASP.Net, JSP...) Unfortunately I am not under any time constraints when it comes to developing this site, I can work with my prototypes and Visio diagrams to my hearts content, always getting closer to that final result with every attempt. When I program professionally I always have deadlines and clients to satisfy, plus I get paid for it!
Anyway for anyone considering starting a blog, use something automated, there are plenty of tools out there. I don't have any particular recommendations for blogging tools, doing it regularly by hand is time consuming, error prone and did I say time consuming? (and when you've left university to start a full-time job, gotten married, and started house hunting you'll notice the lack of time a lot more than when you were a single student!).
Anyway I'm going to move this site over to one of my prototypes systems in the new year, honest, and develop it in an evolutionary process rather than the current feature creep prone waterfall model. Now if I could just add the atom api to it...
Some Diversions
Some interesting links I've come a cross recently (via a variety of people's sites I can't remember, checkout my blog roll): Avoiding the Santa Claus approach to content management (A valuable wake up call for me), Examining differences between dynamic and batch publishing and finally the eXtremely Simple Database.