Wow, it’s amazing how quickly it’s happening again.
I’ve got a website up! I’ve got a place to write, and enough of a structure to get started. This is what I wanted.
So I get an About page up, at least a few sections. There’s more I want to say, eventually, but I try to remind myself that perfect is the enemy of the good, so I make a new Git branch to hold future development of that page. Nice! Progress!
Then I start drafting a post, and hoop, it’s a bit of a doozy. I feel good writing it, but it’s also gonna take a while, so I let the draft sit while I work on some other things. Seems like a good time to flesh out some of the static pages on the site, and—hey, whaddya know, Slash Pages is an incredible and inspirational resource! I could put a few of those up. So I do, pushing Now and Links.
But then I see really inspirational homepages like Robb Knight’s. Robb’s got a blog and notes and links sections, and gosh, I really like how those are broken out. I start thinking that it would be nice to support different post types—daydreaming of sections on the site like /bookmarks and /notes and /reads.
But then I see Henry From Online’s portfolio, which reminds me how much I would love to start curating a digital garden here on the site, and I start to question every bit of organization I thought I’d come up with.
And already I’m hating the restrictions of this theme, how I can’t just make a “Reply by email” button like in the footer of Annie Mueller’s posts, how it’s not obvious to me how I’d add cute little 88×31 buttons in my footer, how the whole dang thing feels so sterile and bland and far from how I want to be, and—
AAAAGGGGHHHHHHH
This is where my brain so frequently short-circuits. I can see so many options, so many possibilities, and nothing I might do right now feels right in light of them. My journals over the years have probably held a half-dozen different attempts at answering the question, “How do I want to organize the content on my website?” Not one has stuck.
I know, I know. The answer is, assuredly, to slow down, think things through, and—hardest of all—remind myself I can tolerate imperfection. Files can be moved. Pages can be built incrementally. I don’t have to have it all in place tomorrow.
God, my brain doesn’t like that, though.
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