Am I Crazy or What?

I’m doing my hiking plan for creativity and fitness this afternoon and I hit an intersection. I could on and catch a bus home, well, two buses, by just going straight. Or I could walk even further, catch only one bus and get some work done at the library. The problem? I’m getting tired, which given my health, can be a real issue. So, naturally, I went even further and am now at the library.

The other day, one of my laptops develops this big problem. One of the programs is getting triggered and asking for a password that I never set up. Kind of hard to get anything working when you don’t have the password. I get past it by cancelling the password demand multiple times until it stops popping up. But do I leave it at that? Noooo! I decide to re-install the operating system with a better version for that particular laptop. No, it didn’t go smoothly, but I kept at it until I had the new system up and running and the critical programs installed and working.

Then yesterday, after getting the above laptop going, I go to update a page on my sight that had gotten broken in a recent update, so did I just replace the elements on the page that I’d had there before? Of course not. I redesigned the page (it needed to be more mobile-friendly), and added yet another page because, well, I needed something to link to. I could have just added the link later when I’d gotten that second page up and running. Like I was going to do that.

In fact, several times this week and, oh, last month, when the website first broke, I have skipped the easy fix and gone for a better one, never mind how much this stuff was making me cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Like with the walking thing. I pushed too far, which means I’ll pretty much be a wet noodle tomorrow. And that’s not good because I have to clean house for a thing on Sunday, which will involve getting things cleared away and not just dumped someplace else, like my husband does. That would be the easier way to do it, but then all that stuff will lay dumped and never get to the right spots, which will, in turn create more problems.

Which is why I seem to prefer going the extra distance. Too often, going with the easy fix just creates more trouble. I’d rather just get it done the right way the first time. Or as close to the right way as I can get it.

Take the webpage thing. The page that had broken was the landing page for my latest book (which was released last spring). The buy links had been dropped – not something that works real well when you’re trying to sell books. The reason I didn’t just go back to the old design was that it was using some bits of software, called plug-ins, that were messing things up for those of my readers using their phones to reach the page. I re-aligned the different elements on the page to put the buy buttons closer to the book cover… Well, you can see what I did here.

I also had to make two new buttons for the new links, convert one of the chapters to .pdf and make the page for the whole Old Los Angeles series – a page I’ve been planning posting anyway. I could have just added the link to the series page when I got around to actually building the series page, but it would have messed up the look of the book page in the meantime.

I will be refining the series page at some point in the future – it’s in the queue of website fixes I’ve got to do. But it’s looking reasonably good. I’m very pleased with how the book landing page came out, too. It was the longer fix, but it was the better fix.

What about you? Are you okay with the quick fix when needed or do you go the long way around?