I've started to put some work back into my web site to help trans-people come out to their family and friends - Coming Out Trans (http://www.comingouttrans.com). I wish I had been able to put a lot more work into it earlier, and I wish I could blame others for the reason why it's taken me so long to get this site up, but a few issues got in the way:
- I got overly ambitious. I do a lot of design of web infrastructures, and I thought I could come up with a nice, simple, easy-to-use infrastructure for web sites. I think I did, but I needed to put a lot more effort to make it easier for me to let others start making modifications to the site. I still want to finish the framework, but getting the site up became more important to me than building tools and massaging my ego. I'm now using PmWiki as my infrastructure (not a great choice, but it was easy for me to get it up quickly with this).
- The inital site was ugly and hard to read. With a more standard infrastructure I could change the look-and-feel quite easily (and others could as well).
- I got overloaded at work and in life. This more than anything else made it important to me that I had an infrastructure that was easier to use. Frankly, the content is very time-consuming to create or find and format, and I need to get another pair of eyes and hands involved.
One other thing that slowed development of the site - I realize that I have a mild form of depression that I'm dealing with. If I could blame it all on being trans it might be easier, but there are a lot of other issues that got in the way. One good thing about this, though, is that I tend to be self-bootstrapping in that whenever I get depressed I tend to find ways to climb out of the deep valleys. The down side is, of course, that I occasionally get such deep valleys.
In my soul I'm an optimist, and when I'm depressed I sometimes lose sight of my optimism , start wallowing in self-pity, and become very self-indulgent. It's not good, and I hate that feeling. On the other hand, my optimism is probably why I can get out of a deep depressed mood as easy as I can.
Anyway, please feel free to check out the site - Coming Out Trans. And if you have any questions or comments please feel free to let me know.
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