Something I wanted

I’m running out of excuses, really.  While I’m not exactly allowed to link to it yet, I can tell you that I got Jeff’s site designed, finished, and ready to roll yesterday.  All it lacks is content.  My famed, never-ending Sites To Do list is now down to one:  the redesign of Kat’s site.

I admit that I’m procrastinating a bit.  I’ve promised myself for ages that I’d sit down and write a content management system (CMS) to manage the monstrosity of cat.net, and I’ve been toying around with schematics and designs and the like.  Now that the time to start working on it again draws near, I find myself concerned that I’m not up to the task.I’ve said for quite some time now that I would not switch cat.net’s CMS unless I had something in place that was fully dynamic, fully skinnable, databased, and handled multiple weblogs.  Period.  End of story.  My primary criterion was a seemingly-simple one:  no more rebuilding.  Period.

I, of course, have to have this one all-important criterion that isn’t satisfied by any existing CMS.  I never said I made it easy on myself, did I?

When I was returning to Alabama after Dad’s funeral, I found myself mentally reviewing the plans I’d completed for my little CMS (which I’ve been calling "Quarto" for a while).  The end result:  I knew I wanted to get back to work on it, and soon, but I also wanted to give myself some time away from coding and design before I jumped in wholeheartedly.

One of my friends—I can’t remember which—said to me, "You’ll know when it’s time to start back."

At midnight last night, I knew.  Jeff was asleep beside me, the cats were elsewhere, and in the dark, I found myself pondering code.  Code!  At midnight!  When I couldn’t come up with the answer to my question, I got up and did some research.  Answer found, I fell asleep, but not before thinking,

it’s time to get started again, and you know it…

So today I finished up a little script I was working on.  Nothing much to it, really, but more practice in handling arrays and making them do exactly what I want them to do.  With that script finished and another bit of confidence gained, it hit me this afternoon:  it’s probably time for me to start working on pseudocode for Quarto.  I’ll need a detailed blueprint to code from, and if I’m going to let any of my friends help (as a few have offered), they’re going to need something detailed to work from.

I don’t care if I never release this code.  I just want the flexibility that will come from having all my cat.net entries databased and the resulting pages fully dynamic.  I don’t care if nobody else ever sees the code or uses it.

Mostly, I want to prove to myself that yes, I’m capable of taking a code project like this from start to finish—not for material or social gain, but because it was something I wanted and felt would be useful to me.  I’m aware that a lot of the code I need to write is, truly, beyond my capabilities at this point in time—but how will I learn if I don’t challenge myself?

Heh.  Yeah.  Exactly.

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