How to overcomplicate things

A guide to overcomplicating things, taken from my experiences recently:

1. Become the webmaster for a church website.
2. Add a new “Listen to Sermons” section to the website where MP3s of sermons go. People just browse sermons by directory structure.
3. Decide that it’s not good enough, and re-write it using a MySQL database.
4. Decide that it’s too much hassle to follow the process of ripping CDs and uploading them every single time, and write a shell script to do it. Because of the database, sermons still have to be added using a special page on the website.
5. Decide that the shell script isn’t good enough, and re-write it again using Python – the primary benefit being, this can talk directly to the database and add sermons without having to go to a special page on the website.
6. Move the website to another hosting provider, who don’t provide remote access to the MySQL database.
7. Remove the database section of the script and go back to the special page on the website.
8. Think “There must be a way of solving this problem with XML”…
9. Implement an XML-RPC web service, and modify the Python script to call it to add a sermon.

I kid you not – I am currently working on the last one in that list!

The good thing about being solely responsible for a site is that you can just make a solution as ridiculously overblown as you like (well, within reason…) 🙂