Apparently I need a document management system for blogging. Oh the irony.
The day was off to a great start with breakfast occurring entirely in the AM. Scoble’s post on why enterprise software isn’t sexy caught my eye between order and omelet. Documentum, hot or not? Hmmm. After coffee in the Square (replete with fat and saucy squirrels) I headed home with an outline in my head. The first draft was done five hours after walking in the door. It felt like five minutes. Easy enough, right?
Yeah, right. I knew I was in trouble when I didn’t make it through the first proofread before heading back to the WYSIWYG editor to move paragraphs around. And change paragraphs. And delete paragraphs. And rewrite paragraphs. The changes cascaded until the whole idea imploded, leaving me feeling drained and empty-handed after seven hours of work. I don’t have a great track record of finishing a draft after an implosion like this regardless of how much serviceable material remains.
Editing a long post feels like bending a wire hanger: Each time makes it more brittle and deformed until it finally snaps–verbal metal fatigue. (I love a good physics analogy.) Right about now I’d be pulling up a version history if this were a design document or a piece of code. Maybe it’s time to treat blogging like “real work” and look for a WordPress/subversion plug-in. At least I’ll learn more about subversion and perhaps even recover my also-failed draft about the WordPress plug-in architecture. Ugh.
I don’t have this problem coding, but that’s more like forging a sword than bending a hanger. A tight code/compile/test loop proofs each change against the whole of the code and works out any code fatigue before the whole thing falls apart. That digital temper/hammer/quench keeps the right balance of hard and ductile to move forward at each stage.
It probably also helps that a machine doesn’t tolerate nonsense like a big text box or a human reader will. Hmmm. Maybe my next post will be entirely perl poetry.