Hard Like Algebra

Rebuilding

Jul 2, 2016
2 minute read

I’m finding myself a bit confused with Erin out of town this weekend, Not really sure what to write about, but I know that I want to write; that I miss this whole writing thing, whatever it is, now.

I had a post that I started in May, right after Jekyll Conf. It was about my job, and how we have labs on Fridays, and we can use them to do “something technology related.” It’s a really cool thing, and one Friday I fixed these here archives.

Look! If you need to see my top ten records in 2007, now you can! 1

The archives are a mess because the photos are effed and a bunch of the links are probably wrong. But it feels good to have all of the posts in one place.

As I spend more of my days coding2 now, I find myself understanding more things3. And that leads me to a few paths that probably sound familiar to some people:

  1. I end up going, “oh man! I could probably do that thing programmatically instead of by hand!”
  2. I also then want to do that, which sometimes I can do.
  3. Either way, though, it makes me feel like I need perfection or need to do nothing.

That last one is a pretty bad place to live. It means that I know I want to make my own template for this blog, not keep using someone else’s. It means that I feel like I need all the accessibility and all the cool CSS things and all the everything before I should launch a thing4.

I’ve been told in the past that I have the bad parts of perfectionism, that maybe that’s what keeps me from Doing a Thing (or at least what propels my procrastination). If you don’t do a thing, then it’s not gonna be imperfect! Repeat forever.

And yet! And yet and yet.

I knew my archive was on a hastily wired up wordpress site because at some point I fell out of love with Wordpress and decided to blow it up and archive instead of figuring it all out. Fast forward a few years and plenty of folks have gotten into the whole static site thing. Finding a way to make Wordpress posts into Jekyll posts isn’t so hard anymore.

But the tool, the script I used, wasn’t perfect.

And it’s not that I can’t be bothered.

It’s that I won’t.

At least for now.

  1. Exclamation points added for sarcasticness. ↩

  2. Mostly in XML, first coding job ever, wish me luck! ↩

  3. Oh, the insights you’ll go! ↩

  4. I even apologize for this, an intentionally sandbox-y, just-try-a-thing site (with my dog, who is admittedly rad). ↩