According to a friend, Neil Gaiman once spoke about people approaching him with ideas for books. To him, an idea for a book alone is worthless regardless of what the idea was. The only value is in the talent, skill, and, most importantly, the actual execution of the idea. People who come up with ideas and don’t execute them are what my roommate calls shit-talkers. A shit-talker is someone who doesn’t do anything, they just say shit.
I am going to say it right now. I am a shit-talker. Awhile back I posted about my quest to develop custom blog software. I can seriously say that I have been working on it. I also signed up for CSS Reboot in order to set a project deadline of November first. Today I decided to abandon the project.
This decision did not come easily. Dropping it made me realize that over the years I have never finished a project that was not for school or work. It’s pretty upsetting to look back and see every attempt to implement your own ideas was a failure. At least I think I know why it happens.
Take the blog project as an example. I was simultaneously the sole customer and the sole developer. Because I will not push myself into discomfort, it becomes much more difficult to force myself to work. That is a nice filter to weed out waste of time projects, but it also means I am unable to make anything for myself unless it is very easy, badly needed or greatly desired. I have a solution. Henceforth, I will only work on projects with a team and/or for people other than myself. Hopefully this will cure my shit-talking related to software development.
What will happen to my blog? After a great deal of deliberation I have decided on switching to WordPress. A great deal of thought went into this decision. It comes down to the fact that the custom blog project was a cork in my bottle of creativity. I wasn’t making blog posts, I wasn’t working on other projects, I wasn’t properly maintaining my computer(s) and I was losing rare and valuable free time. WordPress is free and it does 90% of the things I was going to implement in my software. I think I can manage without that remaining 10%. I might even be able to add that 10% in the future. Not having a unique snowflake for a blog is a tough pill I will have to swallow. Though, it will finally be a beautiful blog. Most WordPress themes are nicer than any CSS I can produce.
Sometime soon there might be some downtime on this site. This time it will be intentional, unlike the great Gentoo Apache configuration change. After the switch this blog will be like Lenin, a corpse on public display. Keep checking here for the full details of how this site will be changing. It is likely that I will probably purchase a new domain for a podcast being created by me and my roommate. Yesterday we actually did a test recording, and we have a dry run scheduled for today. The end of my shit-talking days could be just around the corner.
