Being a Satisficer Wears You Down
Posted on October 5th, 2005
This past spring I switched the blogging software that runs this site from Drupal to Blosxom. Now the itch has returned, and I think I'm going to have to scratch it by writing my own.
The idea of satisificing has been on my mind a lot lately. I learned about it from reading Barry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice. The gist of the matter is that when faced with a lot of choices, focusing on the minimum requirements necessary to achieve your goal can spare you a lot of unnecessary thrashing over details that are otherwise pretty petty. So if you're in the grocery store one day and deadlocked between fat-free cookies, sugar-free cookies, all-natural cookies, or all natural fat free sugarless cookies, you just say "Screw it, I just want cookies!" and buy whatever looks tasty.
That type of thinking works with software too, but only to a point. It's a great way of getting started but hard to sustain as your knowledge increases. In my case, Blosxom was a great choice at first. No more databases to set up! Every post is just a text file in which the first line is the title and the rest is the body. What could be easier?
Recently I transferred this site to Dreamhost, and while moving things around to work inside the basically-the-same-but slightly-different hosting environment I realized that things could be quite a bit easier. It took a good couple hours of fiddling around before everything was working properly. Although this isn't Blosxom's fault by any stretch, it still crosses my hassle threshold. Looking back to when I first got going with Blosxom, the time I spent trying to get the various Blosxom plugins I use to play nice was also a similar hassle. But it was ok, because the ends would (and did) justify the means. I wanted a dead-simple blogging system for my site, so the ends justified the inconveniences of the means.
So although Blosxom is good and useful (as were Drupal, WordPress, and MovableType before htem), I'm getting hung up now on the things that are lacking. It's the same story with other software too-- my email setup is great, but I can't search through old messages. My invoicing software is great, but I can't create PDFs remotely. My RSS aggregator is great, but its interface leaves a lot to be desired.
In short, most things aren't as good as they could be. I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet and put up with the deficiencies; if I did that the terrorists would have won, or something like that.
Solving my blogging software problems is the first thing on my list. When I started this site I never would have thought I'd end up feeling compelled to hop from one system to another every couple of years or months. I think I can work up something even easier to interact with than Blosxom.