WHEN WHAT HOW

Writing yesterday's post (which isn't yet posted because it turns 
out Aussies.space isn't back to accepting SFTP connections yet) 
seems to have firmed my resolve for business success quite 
significantly, even though I started it by questioning why I bother 
worrying about money in the first place. This morning I've been 
thinking about my 'big' website idea more seriously than I have for 
a long time - I might even try to find the messy bit of scrap paper 
that I plastered with dot-pointed ideas for it years ago.

I'm mainly thinking about performance considerations. Minimum 
investment is always my aim, and with a website the running cost is 
directly associated with the software efficiency, so if I come up 
with the leanest possible configuration from the start, it should 
save me money later. How to decide on how long to work on this 
stuff though? Ideally all the original ideas would be implemented 
from the start, so that features don't unnecessarily need to be 
crammed in later. On the other hand, I went that route with my 
online store and it's painful how much effort I put into 
implementing, and thereafter supporting, features that I've never 
used due to physical problems with making their corresponding 
phisical products economically. Then later I did cram in extra 
features for selling products that _nobody_ ever bought there in 
the end anyway. It makes me sad whenever I work on it now.

So I implement everything I can imagine then never use half of it, 
then maybe nobody ever takes any interest in the features that I do 
offer anyway. Or I make some core implementation and aim to build 
the rest later. The latter is obviously the common way to do 
things, but there's no way that I'm smart enough to work out all 
the right provisions to allow extra features to be bolted on 
efficiently later - the only way to get plans right in software is 
to implement them, at least so long as I'm involved.

The one thing that I do have in my favour is that I don't need it 
now. The basic idea for this website has been in my head since 
sometime when I was still at school. It may only be because nobody 
else in the world thinks it's a good idea, but nobody's really done 
it yet, so it may be safe to continue taking my time. Then my only 
real deadline is that I need to have it making money before all my 
other income streams fail. Mind you, it's impossible to tell when 
that will be as well.

All this uncertainty is really why I've never started working on it 
already. But I've wasted so much time on smaller projects that 
never went anywhere, maybe I should just try to wedge this in 
alongside those others? I just wish it wasn't yet another project 
involving me sitting at a computer all day.

- The Free Thinker