Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

Ever so often I go into full-blown geek mode. Hours, if not days, slide by as I wrestle with whatever I’m wrestling with. The housework doesn’t get done, I don’t see the light of day, and my back gets sore. It’s still fun. ;)

This last week I’ve been working on a project I put on the back-burner last year, knowing that it needed more energy and focus than I had to give it. I’d been struggling to get my head round categories and tags at Markeroni. I knew that the site needed both. Last year I put in tags and just as quickly realized that on their own they’d be useless. I could have a page to show all the tags and there would be thousands. They’d be fine for searches, but not so much for helping people to find the information they wanted.

Then I realized that we needed categories and subcategories, and got my brain in a real tizzy trying to figure out what to do about those. Have you ever thought yourself round and round in circles until you’ve felt like pulling your hair out? It was like that. ;)

Eventually I talked it through with a trusted friend and suddenly the penny dropped. I realized that what I needed at Markeroni was exactly the same as I have in these blogs. The answer was staring me in the face!

I was overcomplicating things in my mind. I wanted categories, subcategories and then tags underneath the subcategories. That wasn’t going to work. The tags needed to be a different but related function. At first I was thinking I would put a set of tags under each category/subcategory pair. Then I realized that this would drive me nuts. I’d be stuck with making administrative decisions on a whole series of landmarks covering history with which I would not necessarily be familiar, and would probably spend the rest of my life looking up things on Wikipedia.

So now that I had figured out what to do, I had to program it. Programming is fun: it’s a very different kind of creativity from my writing. It requires that the left side of my brain come out to the fore. I’m very much a right-brained person–I am intuitive but not too good at logic–so sometimes it feels good to do the exact opposite of what I’m used to. But I think I only took to this programming stuff because it does appeal as a creative discipline, and I have only ever been able to get my head around one programming language, which is PHP by the by.

I got out some paper and drew lots of little circles and squares and connected them with lines. It looked good, but didn’t help too much. The setup is quite complex and when you change one thing you have to change a lot of other things, too. This is why I need to write a manual for Markeroni so that when I disappear head-first under a pile of programming overload someone else can carry on the good work (and no doubt rewrite the code–I’m under no pretentions as to its prettiness).

Just getting my head around what is involved is half the battle. In the end I split it up into about thirty little tasks and stuck them in a spreadsheet that I pretend isn’t a to-do list. This became my notebook, too, for when I found bugs or things that needed to be addressed.

So that’s what I’ve been doing all week. It seems as though I can either program, or I can write/blog. I can multi-task in some ways, but when I’ve got all my energies focused on a particular project, it can whisk me away to a desert island full of funky symbols and phrases. I should have something to show you next week. ;)

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