{"id":69,"date":"2008-06-09T22:46:19","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T05:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/?p=69"},"modified":"2008-06-09T22:47:34","modified_gmt":"2008-06-10T05:47:34","slug":"making-it-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/06\/09\/making-it-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"Making It Happen"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago, I had an idea<\/a> for a cool website. It involved grouping blog posts under “debate” questions. There was a simple mechanism for auto-detection if you linked a blog post to a debate page. The point was to be able to group postings with more semantic richness than simple tags or categories.<\/p>\n

It fell by the wayside, so I took it down after a few months. Recently I’ve been seeing sites pop up based on similar ideas. AllVoices<\/a> is one, and Debategraph.org<\/a> is another. It’s nice to see the idea of information richness continuing to develop in interesting ways.<\/p>\n

And it makes me wish I had stuck with my site idea, though to be honest, it wasn’t realistically feasible. The hardest part wasn’t coding the functionality, which only took 2-3 weeks of the large pool of free time I had back then. (Side goals were to get a working knowledge of CherryPy and sqlalchemy, so at least those were accomplished!) No, the real difficulty was “selling” it to users: publicizing the site, making it visually attractive and user-friendly, and getting people to use it in their own blogs. I didn’t have the skills or resources to make those things happen.<\/p>\n

There’s an adage that says success on the web largely depends upon execution, not the concept. That’s so true. I feel like I’ve known so many smart, talented technology people who excel at what they do but haven’t been able to pull off their interesting side projects. I think it’s because we often underestimate the non-technical challenges in getting a website off the ground. In many ways, those are more important to do well than solving the technological problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago, I had an idea for a cool website. It involved grouping blog posts under “debate” questions. There was a simple mechanism for auto-detection if you linked a blog post to a debate page. The point was to be able to group postings with more semantic richness than simple tags or categories. It … Continue reading “Making It Happen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debatewire","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}