For the last few years, I've been pretty good about only focusing on projects that advance my long-term plans. However, there are occasionally little things that don't really help me. The last few days was one of those projects. Recently, I switched over to Jekyll because WordPress was giving me a hard time. I worked on it for a few days, but stopped because I really needed to work on other things.

And then two days ago… oh, that was not the smartest thing to do. I wanted to fix a couple minor things, mainly breadcrumbs and navigation for posts. I figured it'd be a couple hours effort and I'd be done.

I managed to get breadcrumbs back in on the posts, navigation, and everything else that I planned on doing it. However, I had to write a lot of other programs and reinvent the wheel to get everything working together.

Obsession

Somewhere in the middle of last night, I knew that I should have just let it go and used the old version. I have writing and programming to do, not obsess about getting annual and month archives on the site.

Around midnight, I even said “just put it down,” but I couldn't. It was haunting me. I kept telling myself “just a few seconds until I'm done.” Of course, I knew that wasn't true, but I had so much trouble putting it down.

This evening, I finally finished the coding on the site. I only fixed a few minor things, ones that no one will probably notice, but now I'm happier with the site. And I can let it go.

Jekyll and Ruby

I'll admit, some of the obsession comes from solving problems. I don't know Ruby very well (the language Jekyll is written in) and I was trying to just “get it working” which means I use Perl to prototype. Yeah, it isn't the right way of doing it, but it's the way I think and the time I was willing to put into it.

Sooner or later, I'll have to learn how to write some of these features in Ruby and proper Jekyll plugins, but the Perl version seems to work for what I want, including all those breadcrumbs, collection gathering, and archives.

Now, I can do what I was suppose to do.