shelbinator.com

Speaking of group, uh, not-therapy, another recurring theme among my fellow writers is the fact that, while a truism for a reason, it is quite difficult embrace the fact that “the only good dissertation is a done dissertation.” A corollary to that tells us that procrastination can actually be a symptom of perfectionism. If that’s the case, I’m obviously a bigger perfectionist than the OCD detective Monk on TV, because boy do I knows me some procrastinatin’. And that’s probably why the Young Dems of Atlanta don’t have a new website yet.

I kind of walked into this job unawares, goaded for some unknown reason to run for Communications Chair even though there was already some girl interested in the job, and if history has shown anything it’s that Young Dems aren’t really into contested elections. She was more of a web design specialist, though, and the theory was that she and I could be co-chairs for Communications, with her handling the website and email lists and me dealing with press and publicity. And then, for some other unknown reason, she dropped out of the group and I inherited my uncontested position, complete with responsibilities I was only marginally qualified for. Sure, I’ve been blogging since before I knew we were called bloggers (roughly 1995, though the hiatus from 1997-99 makes that an optimistic anniversary), but you remember what my website used to look like, with its non-W3C-compliant claptrap strewn about and overabundance of bgcolor=#0000ff. I’m clearly no expert.

Considering I was already in college when the internet really came of age, I’m willing to forgive myself. What is more astonishing, some thirteen years later (arbitrarily defining the birth of the modern internet as the release of the Mosaic browser), is just how many young people are still so absolutely lost on the world wide web. In the political sphere, I think this unabashed lack of computer skills is tantamount to suicide, but as I look around at the comatose state of my committee and the very shallow bench from whence I might draw a net-capable successor (a low bar, considering how rudimentary even my skills still are), I just don’t see it getting any better. I have to wonder, is it like this with the Republicans? Is it like this everywhere? Or maybe it’s just Georgia, the 49th or 50th state in the union in the brains arena according to some studies. Who knows.

Anyway, I continue to hold a hand-carved HTML website together with duct tape as I investigate the seemingly endless options for a new, glitzier, more functional and (most importantly to the Communications Chair) easier to update website system, a project I’ve managed to draw out for over half of my tenure so far. This blog of mine is now Wordpress largely because I spent considerable time and effort looking into how to coax Wordpress into behaving like a full-fledged CMS for a group with several hundred visitors and at least two or three levels of contributors. Its use of open source PHP code and the popular MySQL database are terribly attractive, a feature shared by Drupal and the related CivicSpace, which currently have my attention and keep me up late at night trying to master their modules and style templates. It’s proving to be far more work than I expected, much to the detriment of my sleep patterns and social life, but as methods of procrastinating the dissertation go, it’s outstanding, and I think I’m actually enhancing my career skills in the process.

What all this tedious web jargon has to do with perfectionism and procrastination is that I could have had a new, slightly glitzy looking, and adequately functional website launched and running months ago if I had only gone along with the crowd and, like our parent state chapter and many other county chapters, bought a spam-in-a-can website from a local progressive and county party post seat holder. These prefab websites are sold as being tailor-made for political groups and candidates, with their integrated contributions modules, pretty mass mailings, and RSVP events module.

Unfortunately, it also caters to the web-tarded, though maybe not as web-tarded as anyone who might hoist a power adapter cord into the air asking “Do I use this?” to connect to the wireless internet (true story). Upon logging into the control panel, anyone who knows their way around an FTP program will immediately freeze in horror, making that same face that my dog my made every time I bandaged her cut feet and wrapped them in sandwich bags and medical tape (”How the hell am I supposed to walk in these, you schmuck?” is precisely what the face said). To administer something as important as your Latest News posts (which are like a particular category blog entries but with less control over how and where they show up), you have to go to a menu item called “extra page goodies.” If you don’t find that pedantic and insulting, by all means, buy a site for yourself. There’s no other way to access the back end of the site and upload your own pages — you can pick from about a dozen preconfigured pages and slap them up from the control panel, that’s about it. There are about as many site “themes” as well, which is why every YD chapter site looks largely the same, and no apparently way to do any of your own styling without personally harassing the site host — something my officers tell me is no big deal since she’s a friend of ours, but it just shouldn’t have to come to that in the first place. For all the ease and convenience built into a ColdFusion-based site that doesn’t cooperate well with Macs in general and either platform’s Firefox browser in particular (yes, it is best suited for IE on Windows, cough hack puke), you get a whopping 20MB of server space and 100MB/month of bandwidth. (For those of you bad at math, that’s not enough room to store two episodes of our podcast, and ten subscribers would break the bank in downloads.) Such roomy accomodation comes at $99/year, whereas $60/year is currently buying us 400MB of server space and 10GB/mo of bandwidth. But hey, less is more, isn’t it?

While the neophytes may think this is just the coolest web system since sliced rocks, I’ve desperately been trying to figure out another way to combine functionality, ease of use, and non-scariness-for-newbies at a minimum cost. This isn’t exactly something that can happen overnight, particularly given the lack of web designers at my disposal and the fact that I have this little dissertation thingy to occupy my days. I believe in my heart that it would be a disservice to an organization I want to succeed to let them settle for the spam-in-a-can site, but I am nonetheless being admonished to “shit or get off the pot,” even though the current duct-tape based site is operating just fine.

In short: it’s time for me to accept the fact that I cannot achieve perfection within the finite time alotted, and to kill myself trying to achieve the impossible is downright silly when mediocrity will meet the minimum standards and free me of my obligations.

Sound like something a dissertation writer ought to repeat to himself every blasted morning? Yeah. Seriously. It’s not something that comes easily to me at all, either. In the past week I’ve flip-flopped a dozen times between “Screw ‘em, I’ll build them their crappy prefab website and let them deal with the gaping security holes and lack of expandability after I’m gone” to “Screw ‘em, they can just wait till I’m good and ready to launch a website that can actually grow with the organization” (assuming, of course, the organization continues to grow and branch out rather than implode). Going with the can of spam would take a huge load off my shoulders and give me more time for the finer things in life, like sleeping, and God would it be nice to just be done with it (a sentiment I’m sure I share with the other officers who don’t know what they’re wishing for). But then, I’d have to have my fingerprints on it. Spam in a can would be the legacy I leave behind. I’ve already got one really crappy master’s thesis out there with my name on it, and I’m sure to publish some seriously questionable models on the effects of shear loading in mixed-mode crack propagation in 2007. It’s really hard for me to relinquish the one project in my life I feel like I actually have some control over, one place where I feel like I might actually be able to excel, even if it only ends up being like screaming on the moon.

Ah well. Screw ‘em.