The Process of Change

OK, I haven't been posting much lately. But I was a little surprised to receive my traffic report last week and find my visitor numbers had gone way, way down. And then this week, my report told me I had none. All week. Which was very strange since I had at least one comment.

Then I twigged. It all happened after I upgraded my blog to the "new" (probably a couple of years old by now) functionality. In the process, my site meter had disappeared from the blog. I guess it can't count my visitors if the code isn't there. So I retrieved the "template" I had saved as suggested by blogger, only to find that it didn't seem to include the bits and pieces I had added in, and it was in xml instead of html. Fortunately it turned out I had copied and saved the old html code as well - in other words, don't rely on blogger to save your blog, do it manually. I have retrieved the bit of code and pasted it back. Although blogger insists I have a title to this bit of html. I'm not sure why. I don't really think the little icon needs to be headed "site meter".

And at the same time, at work, we are trying to get to grips with a new computer system which is, as yet, half baked. I can't help thinking that if architects built houses the same way as computer systems are designed we would have some pretty terrible houses.

It's as if someone went out and found a house that was fairly close to what was needed. It just needs a few add ons which the builder will fix. Except that those two or three extra rooms we need? Well, there's no room for them where it would be logical to put them. So they will have to be at the bottom of the garden, over a gully, with a strange maze of overhead walkways to connect them to the main house. Oh, and once you use one of those walkways, suddenly it will reconfigure itself, so you can't use the same doorways again, you will have to do something different. At least, I think that's what's going on.

We are expected to go live with this system in a few days, but it's just not going to happen. It doesn't help that the software designers are in another town, and the head office system that we are supposed to be integrating with is in a third town.

No doubt we will get there in the end.