I spent a lot of my weekend time on the computer tidying up little bits and pieces. After categorising 200 or so images in IMatch I went to my family blog and decided something needed to change. Several upgrades of Movabletype have meant the look of the site is now a dated, but to change it was threatening to be too much work. I also had to rebuild my XDA (pocket pc) because it had decided to stop sending and receiving SMS.
Implication #1—All that glitters is gold, but gold comes at a price#
As soon as you depart from the standard or base install you are asking for trouble in the guise of work. Yet, staying with the standard can often mean a sacrifice of functionality. Typically I would chose the gold and over time pay for it; either with round upon round of upgrades or a gradual falling behind of what is now possible.
Implication #2—Technology detracts from the real purpose of life
In the search to solve my movabletype problems I went looking at [TypePad] (http://typepad.com). It is a hosted movabletype implementation. My initial thought was, “Hey, they can manage the upgrades for me. That’s worth sacrificing some bells and whistles for”.
This made sense for I had also noticed as a result of thinking about Implication #1 that many people managed quite successfully to use the cut down versions and they had more time to write longer posts. For them the technology wasn’t in the way. They didn’t care if their RSS feed was called index.xml or index.rdf, or if it contained the full text of their blog, or if they even had their own domain name.
Implication #3—Perhaps the default is ok after all
The buttons are there and the temptation is strong. Set this, configure that. Then find, after a rebuild or reinstall, that all you had done didn’t add anything useful to the base functionality anyway.
In applying these implications to my own experience I can’t say that I’ve always made the wisest decisions with regard to technology versus practicality. A lot of time was “wasted” in setting up and then maintaining features that don’t add value to the end product. Now I hope I’m a little bit wiser for the experience.