System update needed!

REALISATION: I’ve realised that one of the things I need to add to the back-end of this weblog is the ability to write an entry but not display it on the front page. Why? Well, twice this week I’ve started an entry but had neither time nor inclination to finish it straight away. So I’m going to add exactly that.

I also need to fiddle with the amount of time you have to “do nothing” before you’re logged out, or rather, I need to make the information you add persistent. Something Lou & I have learned to work around is the fact that if you get bogged down with an entry, when you come to submit it you’ll get dumped back at the login screen. That’s fair enough, but once you log in, it doesn’t finish what you were doing! Which isn’t.

When the average entry was pretty short, and had very little in the way of links, it didn’t matter so much. Now that that’s not the case, I think it does.

In my experience, a lot of business information systems work like this. An initial system is built to do…something, not clearly defined. It sort of works. Then people ask for new functions to be added. They get jammed in. Soon it becomes unwieldy. Then new people need to use it and it makes no sense. The new people have to learn the magic words to make it work. Ad nauseum.

What’s needed is a rebuild from scratch, but there’s often no time for developers, no time for the users to work out exactly what they need. Unwillingness to learn a new way to do things.

[ahem]

Not that any of this applies to the anorak weblog – just something I wanted to get off my chest!

Published

One comment

  1. Don’t know if this is significant or now, but this is the 100th entry in the database. Not that there’s a total of 100 entries, nooo, but still. Its a long way back, time-wise, to the first surviving entry.

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