5!

This isn’t the blog I wanted.

The blog I wanted was more of a blog / wiki hybrid, like Martin Fowler’s Bliki.  I’d carefully craft articles over several days, publishing the drafts in a special area for the preview comments.  When an article was fully cooked, it would be posted to the blog for wider consumption.  Links would bring together articles written at different times, with placeholders for articles still to be written.  Over time, it would evolve into an encyclopedia of my interests, with a generous helping of working code examples.  I even planned special markup for code, so that samples could be automatically tested and flagged for updating when they broke. It would be a glorious expression of my philosophy on work and life.

That blog will never get written.

Visions of perfection either remain visions, or they get imperfectly created.  I like to think about what is possible, but the huge amount of work to “get it right” means that I never start.  For me, procrastination isn’t laziness, it’s an unwillingness to risk imperfection.

It’s been about two years since I named my blog and conceived of the design.  All I have to show for it is a coming soon page. I’ll never have the time to implement the best blog I can imagine, so I’ll have to settle for the one I can do.

I’m already failing.  It’s been several hours since I decided to do it now.  I had to stop researching hosting providers (do it now, wordpress.com is good enough, we can always move the content later).  I had to close the themes pages (do it now, the theme is pointless without content).  I threw away several drafts of this post (do it now, no one’s first post looks any good).

I’ll continue to fail.  But that’s the point.  Failing but doing is better than not failing and not doing.

Plus, the next post will look awesome compared to this garbage.