Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Obsession with Problem Solving

Today I had a case of obsession with problem solving. After meddling with WordPress for hours and feeling disappointed with it, I was not satisfied with the outcome and decide to pursuit further with Movable Type instead. Though I am already feeling exhausted and wasted a lot of time, but somehow my inner voice tells me the solution could be found just around the next corner.

The feeling is kinda funny.

Though setting up a blogging tool is not really essential, but I do it as well.

Though it is perfectly normal for the plugin to fail, but I open up the source code to evaluate the code though I know nuts about Perl and CGI.

Though it is no big deal for the plugin to misbehave slightly or respond in a not user friendly manner, but I want to fix that as well.

Though it is common not to have a certain feature, but I want it in as well.

Though I should have stop and go for dinner, but I couldn’t stop as well.

Am I a case of perfectionism, or mere obsession with problem solving? Perhaps in my mind, I believe that a good blogging tool should have categorization, hassle free comment and CAPTCHA verification system. When one component is not available or not working properly, I felt quite disappointed as I thought those were the basic stuffs. It should be there by default, but it isn’t. I want to fix it, but it is too much effort and it just isn’t worth it. Yet, I couldn’t give up and continue with my pointless relentless pursuit. I should have moved it, yet I couldn’t. My mind is locked into dwelling on the pointless problem solving. Perhaps it is the belief that the solution should be there, yet making it hard to accept when it didn’t work as per the minimal expectation.

I actually spent the whole day trying to solve a non-critical problem (started out of curiosity and thinking it would be fast and simple), which I shouldn’t be doing. I think I have a serious obsession problem, and should learn how to let go of things and move on. It sure is exhausting, seems like a pretty pointless day chasing shadow.

Perhaps I have too high of a regard for WordPress or Movable Type, or my minimal requirements are not realistic, or my standard on usability is too much to ask for.

It is okay to be relentless in problem solving, only if the problem is worth solving.

2 comments:

Kamigoroshi said...

As I commented again in the previous post, Blogging systems like MT and WP rely on two things, knowing what you want and your ability to work it in yourself. No systems like this come out as a jack in the box. If you want things to be done absolutely your way, you either do them yourself or...well...do them yourself.

I'm guessing you haven't been to the Wordpress support forums or the channel too cause I haven't seen you there. Wordpress is built as open source, that means the support community is built on people willing to help out if you're willing to ask questions. Movable Type's support community however requires you to pay and they do have an unofficial support community, how flexible that is, well...that's a different matter.

I suffer from the Rubik's Complex, which is basically all puzzles have to be solved. Even with absolutely no knowledge of Wordpress, PHP, CSS and XHTML, I managed to figure everything I needed to and so much more in 3 months because the community and the documentation was that helpful, what they have now was even more helpful than before. I still can't code PHP and all that jazz but now I help alpha/beta test upcoming releases of Wordpress as well as certain plugins for bugs.

Wordpress is flexible when you are willing to learn and not leave everything to chance. I really dislike it when people say what we've worked on is bad when they don't take the proper measure to fully explore it and take everything else for granted.

Unknown said...

It seems like you are a die-hard WordPress fan, being active in the forum and knows the in and out of it.

Sure, if it manages to capture my attention and interest in the first place, I might take the trouble to go through everything and explore/research further.

Too bad that I already felt disappointed as a newbie (forgive me for my lack of knowledge), thus I am not interested to persue further. Perhaps in the future, the next version perhaps.

Blame it on my laziness or ignorance, blame in on the bad marketing, blame it on the search engine or my skill at using it. Whatever it is, it just didn't work for me as a newbie user.