Personal Blogs

Tomorrow I have to train the admin, and perhaps some other, staff at my school how to upload documents to the school's website and link-in said docs. Aaaargh.

I'm not worried that I'll make an idiot of myself [I probably will, but that doesn't matter], or that I don't know what I'm talking about. What worries me is that I'm going to have to try to teach other people to use something that was built only to be used by me.

There are things that I've built that even I find difficult to use. What on earth are others going to make of the thing? And if they bring along a Word-only type mentality to the party we're talking recipe for trouble.

I'm not looking forwards to this.

I could blame me for this pass, but there isn't really any blame to be divvied up—when I built the thing there weren't any choices, it was me doing it or nothing. So I built it for me, I had to.

This is a common problem: you start something, it works, you are now out of your depth because of unexpected success, how do you mainstream it? It's called scalability; what worked when you were small is positively toxic when you get big. [Think lactose intolerance.]

The big boys can throw money at this, alas my school only has me. And me doesn't have the time to build the interface between a product of my mind and normal people. Even if I could.

Still, I get to stand up and waffle-web at people, so a win for me at least.