We learn by doing: seems obvious, but it apparently isn’t, at least for me.

I need to be reminded once a year or so; I learn best by doing…by trying, accepting my mistakes, and then correcting my efforts. More often than not, my procrastination at tasks like my website, general hackery/development, writing, or even just blogging comes down to a reluctance to just throw something out there and give it a try. (What if it’s not quite right!?) That first bit is seldom perfect, but it gets me started, and it’s a LOT easier to just move along on pure inertia once started.

Lately, I’ve found myself spending far too much time just THINKING about the subjects of blog posts; going over them carefully in my head to make sure I’m covering most of my points before anything ever hits paper (keyboard, whatever). Which…um…then doesn’t happen. This is not conducive to blog throughput. *grin*

But it’s time to retrain myself. I’ve also started carrying a writing journal again (Moleskine, natch), and I’m forcing myself to just pull it out (as I’ve done with the start of this post!) and knock out some paragraphs. Years ago, I found journaling very addictive, so I hope to get that going again. (Sure, I’m editing the hell out of this as I transcribe to my blog, but it gets me moving. It’s all upside!)

The other tweak I’ve finally gotten around to making is an addition my blogging framework to allow me to hide drafts until they’re ready to be published. Yep…I don’t (er, didn’t, until recently) have a way to edit before publishing, except by working on posts somewhere else (I had been using my personal wiki.) So finally, it’s time to fix that and take away a crutch. Amazing how much more I can get accomplished if I can get part of it down permanently!

I briefly flirted with switching out my Django backend for a blogging framework (probably WordPress), but I decided against it. There’s nothing I can’t do in Django, really, and no reason to add additional work (moving all the data) just for the sake of shiny and new. Just took a quick programming session to add the the is_published attribute, and then track down the edge-case references (like the RSS feed). All done, and now I can edit! Yeah, it’s a small victory, but lately, I take what I can get. *grin*