Titanium ‘Nads Part Two

There is, sadly, a downside to having ‘nads made of weapons-grade titanium. You end up with this nasty tendency to bite off more than you can chew. Because, really, when you’re convinced that all it takes to succeed at whatever you try is enough confidence, bluster, and elbow grease, it’s pretty easy to overreach.

You see, I’m not a technical person.

Strike that. I’m no longer a technical person. I put myself through school doing tech support – hardware and user support, mostly – and I can fix just about anything I break. I taught myself to hard-code html and to use CSS because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Hell, when most kids were running around outside or playing in the sandbox, I was programming QBasic and reading my mom’s FORTRAN books.

But in the last five or six years, I haven’t done much more than add some RAM to a computer here or fix a busted laptop screen there. My hardware skills are still there, but the software side of things eludes me now. I can almost see how things are supposed to go together, how the lines of code fit, but not quite.

Right now, I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating that is. Catch & Release is shaping up, and I want to get it off the ground. I want to launch it, and watch it soar. There are creative things to do with it, and managerial things, and editorial things, and I’m good at all of those. I like those. I can make those work.

First, though, we need a working website. One with a good, strong backbone that we can build on. We need good architecture, and good development.

And I just don’t have the skills to do it. I’ve been trying to teach myself – prodding first at WordPress, which is best left to Bethany the Blog Genius, then poking at Joomla, which is best left to a pack of crack-addled monkeys. Now I’m trying to make some sense of a few other platforms, and not getting much of anywhere.

I want so badly to make this work. I want to see the project get somewhere, because my titanium ‘nads and I know it can. But building the framework necessary to support my ideas…that may be a little more than I can tackle on my own.

I have definitely bitten off more than I can chew here. I have help with the marketing and the blog and the general “er, no, you really need to think about THIS” part of things courtesy of the indispensably awesome Bethany, but it’s starting to look like I need to track down more help. A lot more help. A lot of very technically adept help.

When you bite off more than you can chew, sometimes the only solution is to share the meal.