museless aiming

Utility and futility

Given any task, I'm all for efficiency and optimization. But in terms of what task to do, I'm less rigorous. This may well be a character flaw, and it's something I've been thinking about because I've been getting flak on IRC for mentioning the fact that I'm writing my own content management. People are accusing me of 'reinventing the wheel,' but my view of it is, if I don't like the way the wheel works, why wouldn't I make my own?

Moreover, a lot of the 'wheels' used by the average Linux user are written by other people -- if everyone just used whatever was easy, there would be none of these open source 'easy' systems for people to use. To my mind, 'just use wordpress lol' is a really ignorant response, betraying laziness and a general satisfaction with mediocrity. WordPress, while it's not bad, uses PHP and MySQL, which is currently just way bulkier than what I need. It's silly to use it in the wrong situations, and actually harmful to discourage people from writing better solutions.

I fully admit that I work on things that are unnecessary, such as scripting this site together, or posting to it at all. I'm sure there's some suitable non-WordPress solution. But doesn't optimization justify itself? At least to me, any impulse to do something is a good enough reason to create a good system for doing it. Personality type I suppose. It's certainly worth it to learn other people's systems too, but I guess I'm unusual in the fact that to me, 'easier' != 'better.' The best systems should be easy, but if it's easy and delivers imperfect results, what's the point of that?

More than ease of a prebuilt system that takes no mental effort on the user's end, I prefer power (in terms of configurability, options, etc.), speed, and efficiency. It may seem inefficient to write my own content management -- but I can post a new post to this site using about 1 KB of bandwidth, in 8-10 seconds excluding the composition of the post. Isn't this better?

: cms : : musing : : tech :
Fri Apr 27 12:31:16 BST 2007