Patience In Life & Blogging

I can’t say I am aging as gracefully as I might like to. Can’t say I wake up each day an am glad to discover mysterious aches and pains and or bruises.

Wouldn’t pretend to be excited to see less hair on my head and more elsewhere or to have the mirror remind me that the six pack I used to have invited friends to come live with  us.

None of this means I am not grateful for being alive or aware that I have many blessings and gifts others don’t have because I am.

But it doesn’t mean there aren’t moments where it is harder to remember these things or that I wouldn’t prefer not to have to deal with some of these things.

So here I am at the keyboard reminding myself that I am capable of making changes that will impact some of these things in a positive way.

That is assuming I maintain the discipline and patience to see them through.

That Winnie The Pooh is/was sharp, I like that quote. Doesn’t hurt that I know a dozen other quotes that talk about the power and flexibility of water that resonate with me either.

That leads into the whole blogging and life require patience bit, but this time the emphasis isn’t going to be on how I miss my 19 year-old body and metabolism but about why blogging requires patience.

Allow me to set the scene by providing the following links:

• Don’t Fear To Call Down The Thunder
• To Create A Better Reading Experience
• Maybe You Ought To Look Before You Leap

If you haven’t read them and or want a refresher here is a quick summary.

Your fearless leader the wild man named Josh Wilner who doesn’t always refer to himself in the third person spent some time trying to fix the blog so that you would have a better reading experience.

Dude was mostly successful, but it came at a cost and he managed to blow up the blog and break a few things.

If he had been slightly more patient he might have had fewer issues…maybe.

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

I knew from experience that if I wanted to make changes to the blog I could pay someone to make them or I could do it myself and learn/suffer a bit in the process.

Knowledge trumped dipping into the bank account and even if said bank account was 10,000 times deeper than it is I still would have opted for knowledge.

You can call that a fancy way of saying I like learning by doing. I like building and creating with my own hands and figured this wouldn’t take a ridiculous amount of time and chose to jump in head first.

Overall it wasn’t too painful, but there were some hiccups and bumps that came with it that would have been encountered by anyone who made these changes.

Plugins that didn’t get along and layout issues that came from the changes that were made.

Paralysis Of Analysis

Not long ago my son and I had a long discussion about how to make smart decisions and he told me he wished that sometimes he could choose things as fast as I do.

We went back and forth about things for a few moments and I listened to him tell me about how different he was and how in this particular instance he wished it was otherwise.

I stopped him and reminded him about how last year during a soccer game he took a hard fall and fractured his arm.

It didn’t stop him from playing. He bounced back up and chased after the kid with the ball.

Last week he blocked a shot on goal with his face. It him hard enough in the head to knock his glasses off and to cause the ref to stop play so that they could confirm he was ok.

Just to clarify, he is not a clumsy kid, fact is he is far more graceful than I am, but I digress.

Anyway, I pointed out that each time he got slammed it took him less than a moment to make the choice to resume playing and that he never quit.

*****

What I wanted him to remember is that sometimes we can spend so much time studying and looking at something we suffer from paralysis of analysis.

Sometimes we focus so hard upon the details we miss the big picture.

And here is how I apply that to blogging and the blogosphere.

Every time I make a change I here I know there are going to be issues that will impact how the blog looks and functions.

I think I mentioned the new theme had some issues because it wasn’t playing nice with all of the plugins I had installed and that it resulted in the layout not working the way it was supposed to.

It took a chunk of patience and time to figure out which plugin wasn’t working so that I could turn it off and try to find a solution for it.

Consequently I have some posts floating around that look funny because they have raw code appearing a few places.

I decided to let those stand for now in the hope that we’ll find a simple solution that enables me to turn that plugin back on which will clean up the code.

If we can’t figure it out, well we will figure out something later. But it is/was better for me to keep moving and to provide a better reading experience sooner than later.

Right now we’re doing our best to emulate Leonardo da Vinci.