If anyone noticed that I had not blogged in a few days, I was not slacking. You can see from looking at my blog that my layout has changed.
I saw a layout on someone else’s site that I really liked. I checked the source code for their layout and figured out where they got it. So I went and got it for my blog. The main thing I wanted was the four boxes for the front page of my blog.
I decided I would go through and change the coding in the layout a bit, to make it more my own, and so it would not look exactly like the other one. The truth is I became obsessed with “making it my own” I had very little rational thinking when it came to completing it.I was up to about four in the morning, several nights in a row because of my obsession with having “victory” over this project.
I am not very good at coding. What I do know is all self taught. However, I figured what I wanted to do would be very easy. I was so wrong. I started the process Friday afternoon. I was finished by early Sunday morning. It took so long because there were several unexpected “challenges”.
The original layout was written in Portuguese. I do not know that language. I do know Spanish, and some of the words were similar so I was able to figure a few sections out. It did not occur to me to use an online translator for the parts I could not understand, until I was on the last word I did not understand. Yes, I said the last word.
In my arrogance of thinking that this would be an easy project to complete, I laughed at the wisdom of backing anything up. It is fairly easy to predict what happened next. I would get a large section of changes done, then I would make a huge error in coding, and could not figure out exactly where the error was. Which meant, because I had no back up of what I had done, I would have to trash the whole layout and start from scratch. Now you would think after the first time this happened, I would have learned to back things up. I guess I am a slow learner, this scenario played out three more times before I learned the “back things up” lesson.
On Saturday night, it appeared to me that I had managed to get the majority of what I wanted on the new layout on to my blog. I decided that the time was right for me to transfer the layout from my test blog, to this blog. I “knew” nothing would go wrong, after all I had done the original work on a test blog (the only wise decision I made through this whole process).
After getting all the code work moved over, I was so excited. I was declaring victory before “my chickens hatched”. I looked at the main page and saw only ONE of the little boxes I had admired so much. Unfortunately, this occurred before I had learned the back up your work lesson.
Thinking that the reason only one little box was showing up was because of an error I made in the coding, and not knowing enough about coding to be able to look at it and discover the error, I decided to trash the coding and start from scratch again. This time though, I decided to do all the work from this blog, in case the error came from moving the layout over.
By this point, I was tired and frustrated with this whole darn project. I wanted it to be over. However, I could not let go of my obsession about “beating” this project. I slowly continued on with my coding, with my family giving me strange looks at times. It seems people think it is odd when you are trash talking a bunch of codes on the internet.
I decide to step away from the computer for a bit on Saturday night. While I am away from the computer, I am still thinking about the codes, and trying to figure out why only one of the boxes is showing up on my front page, and for a few pages after that. Suddenly I have an epiphany! I remembered that on this blog I had it set to show only one post per day, but on my test blog I did not do anything to the settings. This thought made a lot of sense to me, but I am the person who decided to mess with their blog layout without backing up more than once, showing how illogical I can be.
I go look at the setting for this blog, and click the button so it will show four posts on the main page at a time. Yay! It works! I now have four little boxes on my front page. I am very impressed with myself. I won! Then the reality of the situation occurs to me. I did “win”, but I still have half of the coding to do because of trashing it all when I thought I was the reason the boxes were not where they were supposed to be. It was late, and I was very sleepy.
At this point most people would have decided to finish this project up in the morning. The problem for me is I do not think like most people and once again I was obsessed with getting the whole thing completed. The benefit for having coded the same layout multiple times, is that I knew what I needed to do and could get it done faster than I had done previous times. I even added this cool thing where my navigation buttons rotated. Once again, I impressed myself.
Shortly after I completed my beautiful rotating navigation button tool, my daughter lets me know she has gone to my blog to see what I have been doing to it. She
promptly lets me know that she finds the rotating navigation tool, confusing and she does not like it. She certainly let all the air out of my balloon.
promptly lets me know that she finds the rotating navigation tool, confusing and she does not like it. She certainly let all the air out of my balloon.
I did finally get my new layout completed. Once again I did a victory dance. I took stock of my insane habit of obsessing about things that do not really matter and also the crazy feeling of being in competition with whatever it was I felt I was competing against. Obviously, there is something not quite with my thinking. I think I need to set some ground rules for the next time I feel the urge to obsess about a project.
Oh…..since it seems I am obsessed with constantly changing the layout on my blog, I have forbidden myself to change the layout for at least two months.
The site that set me onto this nightmarish journey of obsession and competition is Enguardia’s Journal
Enguardia is quickly becoming an internet friend. I enjoy reading her blog. She also has depression, diabetes and an anxiety disorder. She blogs about her own personal struggles with and victories over those illnesses, in a very funny, dry humored way.