failing like never before

14Feb/211

Once More With Feeling

I have a tendency of starting things and never finishing them and an inability to let go of the past. It is a dangerous pairing. Overtime, my mental to-do list has grown precariously large and every new project I take up is an eternal entry in an infinity long list that feeds my worries and doubts. At some point this has to stop, either I learn to take on less or I learn to let go. For now, I'm going to try to start finishing out old projects.

I started this blog by writing a custom ruby on rails web application for a high school economics project (I wanted to grow it as a blogging platform and sell ads). I transitioned my content to Typo (github link) after a year or so, and then not long after that to WordPress, which it currently still runs on. Towards the end of college, after experimenting with, what was then, a brand new programming language called Go, I thought that it would be a great learning experience to write a blog platform in Go. Not to mention, I wanted to get off of WordPress. WordPress is a perfectly functional application, but it is a sawmill when all I really need is a pocket knife. I find emacs to be preferable to a browser based WYSIWYG editor and I don't want complex, flashy templates laden with javascript. What I want is simplicity and something that just works. Its been more than ten years since I first thought of rewriting this site. Yet every time I started work, I would get caught up in other things and loose interest.

So I've started writing a sort-of flat file blog application, tailored to my requirements and I hope that this time I'll actually finish this time. I'm giving myself until April, when I have to renew my hosting fees. I want to finally put this task to rest, finally get off of WordPress, finally transition off of this ruby on rails hosting service, finally lighten my mental load.