#12: Motivation
Sometimes at work, I struggle for motivation. It’s quite difficult to make yourself do things when all you have on your to-do board is stuff that you don’t actually want “to-do” - stuff that’s been there for ages and you know won’t go away, but you can’t bring yourself to do.
“I don’t want to edit your website. It’s poorly designed and doesn’t conform to any standards anywhere, and was last overhauled in about 1999. I’d offer to redesign it all for you except I suck at design, and all I’d do would be to keep the current layout but make it XHTML compliant. That’s a bit pointless.”
I need to switch all our work websites over to a content management system or something like that, but I’ve never found one yet that I’ve really got to grips with and liked. I’ve tried Mambo, PHPnuke and Drupal, but none of them have given me all the options I want.
I guess I could write my own, but that would be a disaster waiting to happen. Last time I wrote something, it was designed to be able to take 500 or so “offers” (rows in a database) and display them to the user, so they could be modified one at a time. I didn’t think it’d be a problem… until such time as they (the users, who else) decided that actually, they were going to load 23,000 offers into it instead.
In fairness to my code, it’s stood up to it remarkably well, and provides the XML feed that it’s supposed to, but it’s totally horrific if you try and use it edit more than one offer at a time with it. I told them that they hadn’t given me any idea of the scale and couldn’t be blamed for it, but still they whinged. In the end, I capitulated and made a couple of extra modules - one that outputs the whole database as a CSV file, and one that can accept a CSV file as input and publish it back to the database. At least then they can edit the bastard thing with Excel (which is a total nightmare when it comes to MySQL DATE formats in CSV files, by the way)
If only they’d told me they wanted to load 23,000 offers into it, I’d have taken a bit longer over the design of the database and made it possible to edit multiple offers at once in the style of Phpmyadmin or similar. I’d also have introduced support for scrolling the offers by page, and the ability to jump to a particular offer if you knew something about it. I just didn’t bank on them totally moving the goalposts.
I guess that’s business for you.
In other news, I went to the gym yesterday and worked myself harder than I ever have at a gym before. I felt absolutely great when I left - so good in fact that I’m going again tonight. I’m only doing a two and a half day week at work this week - I’m doing a half day Thursday and have Friday off, as I’m off to see the Arctic Monkeys at the Astoria on Thursday evening and I’m not planning on being back until late.
What was the point of this post? Perhaps I should make a “procrastination” category.
I think I will.