My husband is having trouble with the project he is overseeing. The troubles are no reflection on the quality and integrity of the companies and personnel. It's just the typical problems that come from merging the old and new together, and learning to compromise while making forward progress.
The two companies are merging together, consolidating the engineering work into one company, from the research and development to the production and implementation stage. As the research and development team progressed through the project, they made things up along the way, as does anyone developing new technologies and processes. As it kept growing, they just kept adding more to the process and procedures, figuring out what worked for them, and then continuing forward. When things got complicated, they just did the best they knew how, again, making things up as they went along, putting out fires where they could, finding a method that worked for them, and sometimes them alone, until their work procedure and structure became the standard, with more of a bandage application process rather than a productive, intuitive, effective procedure that would easily transfer to the new staff. The new staff is looking at their methods and methodology and screaming, "WTF!"
He's trying to figure out what happened along the path to the finished product and is getting a lot of "Well, we didn't quite know where to put it, so we put it over here. It's worked until now." and "We just started doing it that way. Had no reason to change it. Worked for us."
Does this describe your blog's content and design?
It perfectly describes my first blog.
Moving From Old to New Website Technology
As many of us old-time web folks did, I started my first site in 1994 with a table-based grid design. By the end of 1999, I got with the program and turned it into the more powerful and flexible CSS table-less design which separated presentation from architecture. This streamlined my site's template and downloading times, but created a nightmare lesson in search and replace techniques. While I changed the code structure of the site, I didn't change the content. Hundreds of pages of static HTML content within that old design came into the new century with me.
By 2003, I started investigating Content Management Systems as the old hand-coded method of writing web pages was tedious and taking more time than generating content. Fixing a single error in all that heavy coding across hundreds of static HTML web pages was also a nightmare.
I needed a simple method. I wanted a template system that would use a single design template and PHP to pull out my content from a database into the template. As history shows, after a long period of research, trial and error, I finally chose WordPress, along with a growing number of enthusiasts who saw the power and flexibility in this new blogging program.
The conversion of my static HTML site (with content and code from 1994) into a format which would be imported into the MySQL database was a nightmare. Now, you have many choices and options for importing content into WordPress. Then, it was still new. The closest I could find to meet my needs was the import method for Movable Type, which meant I had to convert my static HTML web pages into a huge single file for importing into the WordPress database. This meant stripping out all of the not-post-related HTML and converting my old style HTML into XHTML.
Along the way, I had to make a lot of compromises and gave up some structure, data, and design elements that I really wanted to keep. WordPress is powerful and flexible, but it does have its limits, no matter how much I love to push them.
While I was thrilled that the import was finally working, my new design was limited and dated. With that part over, I had time to dig into the web design and customize the look of my site - for only a few months. WordPress 1.5 was released, introducing the modular template file concept we now know as WordPress Themes. It was back to the design drawing board with a totally new way of thinking.
I had to rip and tear into my site to create a new modular Theme from scratch, which gave me a chance to fix a lot of the HTML errors I'd been carrying around with me for a long time. At least within the template files. I still had some issues within the post content itself to solve. Ah, but those can wait. Can't they?
The Magical Powers of WordPress Plugins and Customization
Then I discovered the power of WordPress Plugins and began working with WordPress developers and Plugin authors to create flexible and useful WordPress Plugins that continue to be popular today. Who cares about fixing content when there are so many toys to play with on your blog?
Ah, what times. What memories. What energy and enthusiasm was flying around as people started discovering the possibilities inherent in WordPress. Here was a publishing system that seemed to know no bounds. We tugged, pulled, pushed, and stretched it to its limits, and while we borked it, we rarely really broke it. Like Timex, we beat it to a pulp and it kept ticking.
WordPress gurus dug into my site as it quickly became the WordPress Plugin Crash Test Dummy playground for testing new and powerful Plugins. I still use some of these prototypes that didn't go very far in development but I needed them, as well as a lot of powerful and unusual queries and codes we developed over the past few years.
As with all things, the glory and fun of research and development has to turn to the grind of work. With the latest releases of WordPress, my brilliant bits of code and customization are breaking and becoming obsolete.
After the past two years of living on the web host from hell, I'm now on a new, more powerful server and updating my WordPress blog, only to find the same problems such shifts from old to new methods bring. I'm rediscovering all the bandages I have put on my blog over the years.
My blog looks like a smaller version of what my husband's project involves, and it makes me cry.
Moving Forward With The Updating Times
Preparing for the newest upgrade of WordPress, my heart is heavy. As I look at each bit of code, cleaning up or throwing out, it brings back memories. Such precious memories of jumping on the live chat and begging for help to make this and that work the way I wanted it to work, whether or not it was even possible to make it work that way. And of all the brilliant WordPress volunteers and gurus who helped me make the impossible possible.
I get teary over each Plugin I have to deactivate because it no longer works with the new version, and the author has moved on or away, no longer supporting their brilliant creation...it breaks my heart. Like their authors, these Plugins are my friends and I hate losing them. Still, life goes on. People move and change. But I so miss my friends. In a way, it feels like I'm saying a final good-bye as I turn off and remove their Plugin from my blog.
As I talk to my husband about the challenges of working with the new people to convert the data and old methods into more modern and efficient methods the new team can use, while still giving credit and appreciation for the hard work the others have done to get to this place on the project path, I think about how much old is still left in my blog, and how much it meant to me to have so many contribute so much to the success of my blog and WordPress experience.
It's time. It's time to renew. It's time to get excited again. It's time to dig into the old code, peel off the bandages, and cut away the gangrene. It's time to investigate all the new and exciting WordPress Plugin authors and contributors with vibrant hot creative ideas, and welcome them as new friends on my blog.
It's not just time for a spring cleaning but a major overhaul. It's time to clean out the old, get rid of the clutter. It's time to say goodbye to old methods that don't work any more. It's time to put some sparkle back into my blog.
What about you? Are you still dragging around 3, 4, 6, or even 14 years of technology and code on your blog or site? Maybe it's time to say goodbye to old friends, and clean up your house so you can throw a big party of welcome to your new friends and a fresh new way of blogging.
About the author:Lorelle VanFossen began her online journal in 1994 as one of the first
website owners and publishers on the web. Lorelle on WordPress continues to be one of the most popular blogs on WordPress and blogging on the web, and Lorelle is author of "Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging". Her original site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, is one of the oldest websites on the web. As a public speaker and teacher, Lorelle travels extensively teaching writing, blogging, and photography, and her work can be found as a regular contributor to the Blog Herald and Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, as well as in many other popular print and online publications around the world.
