The Best Laid Plans…

Burns said it, more or less. “The best laid plans of mice and men oft times go astray”. So it has been, with the move to the new Templates.

This move hasn’t been as certain as previous updates. At least in my memory, we had a very definite point at which everything stopped and we all just worked and waited and watched… and at the appointed hour we updated our pages and we went on with our lives.

This time it’s different. Economists warn that these are the most dangerous words in the English language. People are getting mortgages for $500,000 houses without even having to prove they have a job, let alone proving how much they actually earn? It’s okay, a year from now they will sell the house for $550,000 to a bigger chump with a better mortgage and everything will be fine. This time, it’s different. Right.

But the path of this month’s Template change has been different. Last month, I gave a talk, an overview, of the new design and what changes had been made and how they would affect everyone. At that meeting, it was announced that we had reached a deadline, that the Template markup Would Not Change from here on (for a while), and so we were now all safe to download the latest archive and get to work on our pages. I should point out that at that meeting, I was told that something had changed just that very morning, and a feature I had put into my presentation “would not ship” as we say. Changes were happening right up until the very end, but they were done, now.

I made a joke about it. At some point during the discussion of What Was New, I offered to bet anyone in the room that we would have at least one update before our August 17th kick-off. Sadly, there were no takers.

Since that day, I have completed Template training based on the markup I was able to get in early July. Since that day, I have given the New&Improved Templates training five times. And each time it has been new and different from the last.

So, there are changes. And these sometimes cause a cascade of other changes. Because “this” is different, now “that” needs to change, as well.

I’m trying to keep up, but the communication between the guys doing the work and myself isn’t constant, and the pages are in a state of near constant change, it seems. A piece I didn’t quite understand was removed, so good. A piece I don’t quite understand was added, and that’s bad. If I don’t understand it, I can’t teach it, effectively.

Included files that used to be a dozen lines long are now much smaller. Files we used to discuss have been removed. And the last two times we have done the training, three of the students have had their computers lock-up on them, causing them to lose all of their work. That’s frustrating, because it has happened toward the end of the class, when I have people build a new page which incorporates all of the changes made to their navigation, their footer, etc. If you don’t actually see that happen with your own eyes, then the entire exercise is little more than… theory, almost.

We are getting closer to being finished. There isn’t much left that the coders can change. Did you just hear God laughing? Maybe that was someone in the next cubicle… Anyway, things are probably approaching a stability we haven’t seen in a while. I am looking forward to the first time I give the same training, twice.

And the great wheel turns.

Big, major events have schedules that fill an entire calendar. That music festival you love? That giant, week-long airshow? That gathering of car enthusiasts that takes place every year in August? The planning for that single week is ongoing throughout the entire year. It may be time to adopt that kind of model, here. Maybe we should start working on the 2012 package in September, taking careful note of all of the responses we get to the rollout in August. If we had three years, instead of three months, I suspect we could turn out a damned fine Web page. And maybe even one that wouldn’t need to change, for a while.