One small step for a Blogger, one giant leap into the Blogosphere

December 3, 2006

Software is a wonderfully weird, mysterious beast. Most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It often behaves in peculiar ways when its creators and users least expect it.

Great and noble minds expend significant creativity, time and energy designing masterpieces that we minions look upon with admiration and wonderment. We often ask "how'd they do that?" And the we exclaim "I gotta havit, gotta havit right now!" We take a giant leap of faith and subscribe to trial versions and install them into production with ample expectation that this "new thing" is going to satisfy our appetite for ever increasing complexity not thinking what the ultimate end user might regard as negative usability. After implementing new and improved capability widgets, the trial versions die a quick and painful death. We languish in a short state of mourning before we remember the secret unlock code to re-activate the cherished system in all its production glory is available for a mere pittance. Having secured the code and re-activating the NEW AND IMPROVED Version we proclaim "this is a good and wonderful creation I gave to my users" and enter into a state of self absorbing bliss.

We are often so convinced of our technical prowess and the quality of the masterful underlying work of art that we embark on multiple simultaneous implementations of advanced features to satisfy our need to show the world that we have arrived on the bleeding edge of every Web standard known to the inhabitants of the universe.

It is now that the most devastating, ego diminishing messages are received through the collaborative features of our creation (this is Web 2.0?):

• the search function doesn't search, it just dies...
• Server errors 404 and 500! O m'god...
• Trimming comments in the middle of a link causes unexpected formatting results
• your RSS 2.0 comment feed is malformed!...the result of smoking and drinking while creating it?
• drop downs are not dropping...pop ups are not popping (to some this is OK because they are really annoying).
• and on, and on, and on...

We then expend exorbitant amounts of debugging brain power completely disregarding our spouses, the dog and taking the trash out on Thursday mornings. Speaking of trash, that thought runs through our minds briefly as the absorption rate into fixing software is increasing exponentially.

One by one, each of the sad reports of malfunction (and malformation) are completely cured and we once again retreat into a blissful and highly egotistical state of mind. Finding and fixing bugs in Blogs is a very satisfying endeavor even though it comes not without immense personal sacrifice (read lots of personal sacrifice).

This long and sometimes excruciatingly painful musing must now come to a natural creative conclusion. I have coined a new term for all good and honorable Bloggers in Blogosphere:

BLUG: (unknown type) BL.og b.UG...
1) a malfunction of blog script due to NOT reading the instructions before implementing new features (this is also synonymous with: "the male species hate to ask someone for directions");
2) a malfunction of the underlying Blog platform used to create Blogs on the web (as in: does not perform as advertised, or finding a unique way to exercise the software that its creators never imagined);
3) Alternate existing definition: an acronym for the Bangalore Linux User's Group.

Entering this on Wikipedia will have to wait until I have the latest BLUG attack resolved. Now back to the real world that I have so cleverly ignored...

Comment on One small step for a Blogger, one giant leap into the Blogosphere. Follow this article is off. More articles like this one filed in: Blogging , Real Estate Technology