So, today Tiger almost makes a charge and wins his next major, but Michael Campbell from New Zealand shows more cool and poise and refuses to give down the stretch. [This was written June 19; see below.]
I mention this because — in between watching US Open coverage — I’ve had mucho frustration in working with my pending blog release. The truth is, I’ve lost perhaps three hours of work today (on Father’s Day, no less) because of these quirks and screw-ups. I’d like to scream. Here’s what I think the culprit reasons may be.
- The delays with server-side editing begin the process; it is not natural to "suspend" normal editing actions while the latency of the network and the server conspire. This, in turn, is complicated by
- This whole "smalll fry" CMS perspective that has all data being hosted by MySQL. I truly don’t know where the bottlenecks occur, but the delays in posting and updates are HORRIBLE
- There quite conceivably are editor issues associated with these embedded frameworks. Despite everything I’ve said about tools and testing and the like, most of these pieces "feel" untested, less than "commercial, and incomplete
- There is also an open source aspect. Granted, anyone can put an open source project out there, and many are impressive, including the ones adopted for AI3. But they often feel unready and incomplete.
It is perhaps not a surprise that productivity benefits from information technology appeared non-existent until just a few short years ago, and then apprarently had a major effect on the accelerated growth that did occur. I suspect much is the same with open source projects and "bleeding edge" initiatives. I can definitely say that I have spent many wasteful hours in the past weeks since deciding to test this blog route. While I can see its attractions, and I believe I understand its popularity, it is also incredibly inefficient. Perhaps like IT in general, it may be years or perhaps decades before we see blog productivity benefits showing up on our income accounts.
I need to update my best practices post. Thus, while I can talk in generalities about broad productivity or not, the fact I am losing efforts, losing time, etc., is not acceptable. I can accept learning. I can accept system fragility. I can not accept not learning from those things to make sure that next steps are not more productive than previous ones.
To put it mildly, today was an interesting experience in getting ready to blog. I thought that most items had been worked out, and I was now working on "efficient" means for converting my nornal style of working with information — MS Word and Excel, for example — into "easily" transferred blog postings. I discovered that many kinks still remain and productivity can be alarmingly low.
Maybe I’m being too aggressive in wanting to have systems and processes in place to make my work with this site be an "easy" part of my day. Of course, I’m doing all of this for multiple reasons to:
- Understand the blogging and self-publishing phenomenon
- Get my hands dirty with respect to existing tools and infrastructure
- Actually put in place a procedure that will allow me to continue to contribute in an efficient way
- Be aggressive about capabilities and understand "gaps" for bloggers (esp. the "top 1%" in moving forward
- My major discovery for the day is that all of these pieces I have been assembling do not play "nicely" together.
I should continue to work on these pieces to get more productive, document lessons and best practices, and avoid devastating losses of effort.
Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb
