Cobwebs of Unfinished Dreams

I was rearranging books today–getting the writing books on one shelf, and the web design books on another, and the divination books on a third. I never found the book I was looking for. I must have read it at Barnes & Noble! 😉

But I did find a lot of cobwebs on the bookcase and a number of thoughts about unfinished projects that were once dreams of mine. Cobwebs are easy to dust away, but what about those dreams?

At least one dream I had was to have a website for goddess seekers to use as a study and meditation guide. I did get it up and running, Find a Goddess, but I have never gotten the database update page working properly so that it is easy to add new information to the database or to update and edit the mistakes that were entered when I was learning how to design and display information.

I’ve talked to a few people–students mostly–about fixing the code, but they don’t want to mess with it. It’s hard to go in behind someone else and figure out the logic and why something is coded as it is. I’m sure it’s not coded with any style–it was a learning project.

I’ve taken time–several days at a time–to fix this project, which has been on the back burner some three or four years now. Every time I start to work on it, I just get frustrated and  overwhelmed. But I decided that if I could do all the rest of it myself, I could get that page fixed and then plan to spend a hour a week or so updating and making the site the kind of place I wanted it to be.

But today I decided that with the right attitude and some pre-paving, I could plan to tackle the project tomorrow. I’m visualizing feeling calm as I look through the various attempts I’ve made before. I have made some notes on how to think about the code, so that I am not designing and coding with the same synapses. I can write simple code (php/HTML) or I can be creative, but not both at the same time. So I did the design today, and I plan to code tomorrow.

I feel so much better about dusting off this project. I would eventually like to set it up to bring in a little money now and then, with some good affiliate programs or adwords, but I’d mainly like for it to work. I would feel that I’d done what I set out to do.

While it remains to be seen how well the project will go, I feel better by making a decision rather than pushing the thought away that I (AGAIN) have not completed something that was important to me, and that (AGAIN) I am not where I hoped to be by now.

It is okay to let a project go, too. I could even take it down and feel reasonably good about that. But I want to get it working like I envisioned it and learn more about how that works. I have always found that developing a skill pays off in the long run, even if it’s only a little and a little late.

I’ll do an update on this topic next week, but for now, I’m visualizing an updated database with new entries and corrections from the old ones.  Wish me luck! That’s what I’m wishing for myself.