9:02 AM 4/26/2007

I just spent the better part of an hour checking in on Olsson's. Most of my efforts were wasted, though. I usually claim an hour of telecommuting for the Email Newsletter when I take a week off. We use several different systems for "content management", and I've never been all that impressed with the extra work needed to force these systems to play nice with each other. It was more manageable when we stored the author event calendar in a database on our server, and had a script to display current results. But, it meant forfeiting any linkage to the title database that goes with the shopping cart site. They pushed us to move the calendar to their site. So, now we've exchanged a little added content for a major loss of control. The same thing happened with signed books, and bestsellers. By storing it elsewhere, we get the benefit of book jacket art and descriptive text, and we get automatic linking of books to the shopping cart. On the other hand, it becomes an order based only on book number, so we have to beg the customer to tell us when they want a signed book - the server used to flag the order as signed so we would know.

Where I work, I am the only person who knows how to do certain jobs. They are my 'exclusive domain'. This seems absurd, because to me they all seem so easy a child could do them. Not only is it unlikely that I will ever teach anybody to manipulate images, store them on the server, then write HTML tags to display them - It is also unlikely that anybody will bother to learn it after I go. Our site is not so large. I edit the pages in a text editor. One of the benefits of using a text editor is that it doesn't contribute extra junk code. I took a class on Dreamweaver, and I just couldn't get excited about it. I've seen it listed on people's resumes, and it appears to require some effort to learn, but Perl or PHP or something would work much better. You want the ability to manipulate several files at once without worrying about the details, but it's not a devil's bargain - you also have to retain the ability to obsess over details when you need to. If you're going to learn something, why not learn something with some power?

It took me some time to get to this skill level. The biggest problem at first was obscurity: The sources of information were pompous, making assumptions about what I know instead of explaining. Engineering school was a similar experience. Knowledge is some perverted badge of courage to the old men who teach it. That hard won knowledge could be disseminated freely, or guarded jealously. The knowers are vengeful - they want to exact at least as much pain as they endured. But, that's not how a non-zero sum game is played. The pain of learning has to be something you can spare your pupils - if only just a little bit.

I still remember that frustration when I teach others. I know to keep the lessons simple, reinforce the basics, and build up carefully to higher levels. But it never seems to help. I didn't even have anybody to teach it to me. I expect that all good-natured teachers reach a similar conclusion that students are spoiled and lazy - unwilling to commit the foundation of a subject to memory. So much of learning today is vocational. We want a quick fix for our ignorance. We have a specific skill we want to buy for ourselves. I'm not here to argue for liberal arts, but I think no skill can be considered in isolation, and there are times when you have to shift to a lower gear - proceed more slowly to climb the hill. You may need to work at least that hard to master a dependent skill.

The old email newsletter was built around the event calendar. It was all done on our server, so it meshed quite nicely. We moved the newsletter to Constant Contact - yet another server. I'm much happier with the list management at CC. There were just things I didn't have the authorization to do. I spend less time worrying about email lists, and spam reports. But I hate the message editor. It is stubborn and fussy. Changes require posting to server side scripts and big page reloads (They could really use some AJAX: call the server to perform incremental changes and update that part of the page with Javascript in the browser). Sitting there on a tight deadline while the page reloads each time I make a minor cosmetic change leaves me very anxious for hours afterward. I should be able to have it both ways, but because we have to collaborate, online editing is the only solution.

We also had a lot of trouble recently with character sets: One person writes the author event descriptions on a Mac, and posts them into the event calendar editor. The odd quote marks, apostrophes and em dashes store and display properly, until you try to copy them out. Then they become clusters of euro symbols and accented vowels and other junk. You can't paste those into Constant Contact - it can't deal with them.

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