Home » Blogs » kitt's blog
My $6 book« an older post
a newer one »Driving stories

Took me long enough

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 18:01 on 19 July 2007

I really hate when a simple task, something that I think should take an hour tops, not only takes me longer than that hour, but takes me longer than that hour because I want to do it correctly. Sometimes I wonder if my level of "Good enough" is too high. Eh, probably.

Today's example: yesterday a post came through on the Drupal support mailing list:

Does anybody know of an existing module which will extract tags from
the body of a post (i.e. a line like "Tags: tag1 tag2 tag3") and pass
them to the taxonomy system to tag that node?

I've had a skim through the Taxonomy related module list on drupal.org
and didn't spot anything...

Looking at this request, writing such a module should have taken an hour, maybe, right? Well, as I started working on the module, there were features I wanted, details that, well, would bug the crap out of me if they didn't work right. They were small things (is the trigger word "tags" or "tag" or "tagaroo", or is the tag line removed from the post after processing), but ones that, well, if someone gave me the module, I'd want.

So, in they went.

And my hour "give back to the community" turned into a retarded 4 hour project.

Four hours.

Four hours not spent on client work. Four hours not spent on my big projects. Four hours that I really could have used better elsewhere.

Gah.

I'm so annoyed at myself.

At least I managed two posts from it. :\

Comments

Submitted by kitt on Thu, 2007-07-19 18:10

And THEN after sending out the stupid module, I actually wandered over to Dan's site. After ten minutes of perusing his site (where "peruse" probably doesn't mean what you think it means, look it up), the only thought I had was, "Well, F---! He could have written this himself."

Now I'm even MORE annoyed with myself.

Gah.

Submitted by dankarran (not verified) on Fri, 2007-07-20 02:33

Sorry about that Kitt, I hadn't anticipated somebody would go out and write it, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't duplicating a module somebody had already written. Guess I should have said in my email that I'd write it if there wasn't one already :)

Is it ok if I take what you've done, extend it a little (I'd love to be able to maybe specify different vocabularies, like being able to map 'place:' to a location vocabulary) and post it back to the community, with due credit of course?