When Will You Make an End of It?

(No Photo Gallery)

Pope Julius II: "But when will you make an end of it!!??"
Michelangelo: "When it is finished!"
— From the film "The Agony and the Ecstacy"

Source: Web Gallery of Art (www.wga.hu)

ERHAPS IT'S A stretch to compare Scribi with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or myself to Michelangelo, for that matter).

But, I can certainly identify with the frustration of trying to forecast the completion of a creative process.

In the previous entry, (Many Hats), I related the necessity of putting the technical efforts on hold, in favor of adding more content. Content, after all, is the reason you're reading Scribi. The candidate material was our Italy-Greece-Turkey trip - enough material that, combined with the opening Carnevale articles, will make Scribi a viable site worthy of opening to the public.

As I perused that material, I remember thinking, "Well, this shouldn't take much more than a couple of weeks to get together and then I can return to the techie stuff."

That was more than three months ago.

At the end of three months, I'm finally wrapping up this content and getting it ready to incorporate into the site.

I suppose I should be used to it - as a software developer (another creative process), I've always been faced with the reality of slipping schedules. And, as customers of software, we're always tapping our toes, wondering when the next version of our favorite package - promised "real soon, now" - is going to arrive. The reality is that it takes time and a lot of work to incorporate new features, test, find and fix bugs, retest, and make it all work so that it appears seamless and easy to the user.

Content creation is another thing - or, so I would have thought. After this exercise, I have to admit: even with a refining workflow, it has taken a lot longer to coalesce and develop this material than I would have expected. I have more appreciation for writers on deadline, who have to create content on a regular schedule that will satisfy the requirements of space and interest for demanding editors (and, ultimately, readers.)

The good news is there's a lot of new material for you to peruse: thirty-seven articles, twenty-eight sidebars, and over three hundred images covering four countries and the Seas of Greece. The bad news is I had to cut off Istanbul and Milan - after three months of writing, editing, picture selection (captioning, correcting/cropping) and article creation and layout (and a trip in between), I have to get back online and go back to the techie stuff.

O, WHAT'S NEXT, you may be wondering?

Beyond the new content, you'll see ongoing changes in Scribi's organization - easier access to new material, and alternate access to material that is here, already. After that, I'll be spinning up the propellor on the techie hat to high rpm: I'll be putting in the subscription and membership login mechanism, exposing the site to the search engines, and doing whatever else is necessary to get Scribi up and running as a real web entity.

And, yes, there will be advertising, but it will be tasteful - no annoying popups. Ever.

After that, I can get back to Istanbul and Milan.

It should only take a couple of weeks...

Scribo, ergo sum.

(No Photo Gallery)

When Will You Make an End of It?

Scribi [home]->Editorials->[here]