Even finding time to write this blog post is problematic, having to push it into the few spare minutes during my lunch break. I simply have not found the time to work on TDO Mini Forms. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t found time and motivation this last six months.
Part of the problem is that I implemented TDO Mini Forms for fun, a neat little plugin for WordPress I could use on some web projects (all dead now by the way). Then it was driven by my love of coding and the small crowd of users. But I changed projects in work several months back and could no longer slip the time in to bash away at some code for myself, at least during the daylight hours and now there is a mountain of support requests on the forums that I can’t even comprehend getting through and a slow disconnect between what I enjoyed about it and what I wanted to enjoy about it.
Essentially, it’s not fun any more. It’s bug fixes, RTFM and maintaince upgrades (with WordPress 3.0 is coming and that’s like a big stomping unstoppable giant, which I fully expect to splat my plugins…) it becomes daunting. I’ve added too many features (that can do wonderful things), and people either complain about them (“it’s too complex”) or demand more (“editable image uploads ftw!”). The whole code base of TDO Mini Forms evolved chaotically and the idea of re-writing (and having to maintain some degree of backwards compatibility) it’s quite off-putting.
And then I’m working on another creative project that I’m genuinely motivated about, but isn’t software. And when I have free time, I dive into this project, because I want to, not because I have to.
It might be more interesting if I was getting more out of it, say I was a web-developer (I’m not, I’m embedded engineer) and it was promoting my career or getting my clients, I was a big wordpress-advocate and people were coming to my blog to hear the cool things I say (I don’t have much cool things to say, unless you like tabletop roleplaying…), I was making enough money from donations I could afford to get a new gadget every once in a while or it was powering a big project I loved, but it’s not.
So I’m not sure where that leaves TDO Mini Forms. I think probably it’s been on an unofficial hiatus for the last while already. I don’t want to dump it, but I’m not sure of when I’ll get back to it. I have been thinking about it a lot, but not working on it. (I may write up those thoughts in a future blog post).
One thing I will say, if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and hard to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid. 
I have to send out a big thanks to all the people who have donated to the plugin. I really do appreciate it and it’s why I went so far with it. Thanks for listening.
My wife is currently watching “American Idol” and normally I escape by working on my current creative project/hobby (hint). But last week I reached, I guess, a nice milestone. And since then, I’m “floating”. I am between projects (I know what the next thing I’m going to work on), but I’m not restless. It’s a sort of “creatively” content and I’m without frustration or need to dig into something. It’s a nice feeling.
My thoughts have been skirting around the idea (note: I’m just rambling here...) that that some of my hobby projects like “COG”, “LH” and TDOMF would benefit hugely from opening them up to input from others. I say “skirting around the idea” because I am not completely comfortable with it. I guess, in a sense, I’m not a particularly open person either (which probably explains a lot about the content of this blog!).
I remember a sad incident from my childhood – while I was in primary school, I wrote a “ghost story”. I took several middle pages from a copy book and taped them together to form a little book. On the last page I had done up this elaborate skeleton drawing and the story was pretty much written around the drawing. Now you can imagine the effort a six year old puts into something like this. I had it my school bag, proud as punch. But after the lunch break, I found that some of the other boys had taken it out, drawn all over it and destroying it in the most mocking way they could. They were waiting for me to find it at which point they started to tease me about it, making fun of my writing.
It’s amazing that I can still conjure that memory when I think about the idea of allowing others in. These days I’m a professional software engineer, working on a good team. I have no problem collaborating and sharing ideas about the project. But when I talk about my personal hobby projects, like TDOMF or LH, I don’t talk. They are mine and I don’t share. I don’t think it’s just a childhood memory that stops me. I think it’s a number of personal reasons. First is self-confidence, opening up a piece of work for others to collaborate in, requires that others want to collaborate with you (anyone remember the GCG website?). The second is, I haven’t met or found anyone online or otherwise I would want to share my projects with. And lastly, they are hobby projects. I’m doing them for myself, at my own pace and for the simple pleasure of working on something. Bringing others into it, means delgating, sharing responsibilities, planning… bleurg!
But also, part of the issue for me, is the mental or artistic ownership of the project. I have a “vision” of what I want and I work towards that. The vision may change or move around but I’m always fairly clear on what I want (which may end up being different to what others want). The best way to express that vision to others (so they know what I want) is to bring it about myself, trying to explain it will lead to miscomunication. It’s certainly the case for TDOMF (which is easier to talk about as it’s software). I want to have certainly features implemented and certain polish to it before I give it a version 1.0. Once it hits there, I may consider looking for help with it. The same goes for LH, my Fudge roleplaying project. I have a vision of what I want and until I get close enough to it, I’m not particularly enamoured of inviting others to help me. Take my Reboot RPG, hopefully it’ll appear in a little while as a PDF. I don’t think I’d mind if others expanded or radically changed it after that.
Yet, COG is another Fudge roleplaying project of mine and the vision I had for that is sort of distributed or modular in a way. I have several ideas and components and I want to make a coherent game out of it. I don’t think I’d have too much of a problem exposing it to others and even trying to do something with it (if people liked what they saw). Maybe that’s the trick to it, to share a distributed vision with a group of people who you respect and work towards it. The only obstacle is, I haven’t met a whole lot of people that I respect in a sense that I would work well with them (or vice versa). (I now think of the small disaster Specky went through).
My own friends who I roleplay with have all done their own pet RPG projects. For one, Dark Obsidian, I submitted some fiction to but I didn’t collaborate with the author on it. My friends all have different tastes, particularly in roleplaying. That’s why we play well together but probably unlikely to work well together because we wouldn’t get over some of the fundamentals of game design.
My other hobbies, drawing and writing really are very much single-person activities except when you want to show them off. Maybe that’s it, I’m closet perfectionist – I don’t want to share my projects until they are perfect (close to my initial vision)!