A Work in Progress

This is a small story of conquest.

A couple of weeks ago, deciding upon starting this blog, I came to realize that I’m displeased with current blogging frameworks. The reasons are numerous, but one issue stood above all the rest:

• If you write all of your thoughts in one single blog, no one will read it.
• If you write several different blogs about topics, you will be jiggling endlessly between them. More detail here.

I decided to enhance my blogging platform. I ruled out any aspirations of creating a blogging platform from scratch on clojure, especially seeing how wordpress has an amazing amount of work invested in it: The plugins, themes and active community. I’ve never worked with wordpress. The last time I touched PHP was 9 years ago. To be honest, I was quite pessimistic about the outcome.

However, I felt like I had no choice. I’ve searched the web up & down, asked on forums and talked with bloggers who had similar (but incomplete) features implemented. It took me about a week or two to realizethat  no one had the answer, although other people were searching for the same thing. And while others settled for mediocre solutions or gave up, I felt like I could not.

I was determined to write a blog, and I was determined to do it proper. I couldn’t stand the thought of putting something mediocre up. I felt the blog should reflect me, and a blog that offers a poor user experience would not allow me to fully convey myself to my audience. I guess I was also curious to see how I would do in this kind of situation, but that wasn’t my main motivation.

I find that learning by example is really effective for me, so I downloaded some plugins that appeared to be similar to what I had in mind. Their code was messy and unpleasant, yet relatively short. A couple of hours of looking through it, along with running some tests of my own gave me the gist of it.

I took some time with trial-and-error, getting a little familiar with wordpress’s plugin hooks (poorly documented and ill-designed), and then put up my very own plugin. It took me only a week, but the experience really pushed me forward.

I later started working for a company, building an aggregated search service. I was more confident this time, and managed to beat every deadline given. When they thought something would take several days, I’ve completed it in several hours. I don’t think it was bad estimation on their side; It was my newly born confidence that allowed me to not hesitate in front of odd bugs, cryptic syntax and new paradigms I encountered (and will encounter). This is what I call “the problem solver’s conduct“, and it will be discussed in a later post.

Epilogue and Summary

Starting something from scratch is an extreme experience: It is both exciting and terrifying. When sailing out to uncharted waters, it is good to have some inspirational stories to puff reassuring winds into your metaphoric sails. Excuse my poetry.

Perhaps engaging in a one-week development frenzy wouldn’t seem to fit with big multi-million entrepreneurship, but Lau Tzu wisely states that “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. I look back with pride at this single step, the beginning of my journey.

Two or three weeks ago I discovered another wordpress plugin, wordpress-subdomains, which is even more feature-rich than my own plugin. My plugin still has a viable existence, but I’ve decided to move to wp-subdomains, and add a couple of patches in with it. I’ll probably keep supporting my own plugin if I find out anyone is using it.

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