Keeping Up With Upkeep

It's always worth asking “what is this instead of?” or “ what is this in addition to?”

So that's what I asked myself. Because I was ready to pull my hair out.

I'd arrived at a realization I didn't love... I'd been looking for a way to customize the blog's homepage, and the template for each blog post itself when I was forced to accept I'd have to write the code for the changes I wanted.

That looked like creating a text box with two buttons, side by side—an option to subscribe daily, or weekly. But after digging through the page templates of my website's installed theme, I couldn't find the option to customize the page footer. That's where those subscribe buttons were meant to go. However, the page template had one, locked global module that wouldn't let me adjust the formatting.

I'd only be able to customize the words in the box. I grumbled to myself while ruling out other alternatives. Since you can't edit installed web themes, ultimately, I had to create a duplicate copy of the theme. That's how I'd be able to edit the code within to create the changes I wanted on the blog pages.

That wasn't even the scary part. Doing this would mean I'd have to publish the duplicate theme as the active setting for my entire site, even though I only wanted to change one pre-set module on one page.

So, why go through all of this?

What was this instead of or in addition to?

If I didn't do this, any time I wanted to add these buttons to a new blog post, I'd have to do it manually while drafting the post. If I ever wanted to change the words, links, or anything about them... I'd have to manually update each and every blog post I'd ever publish. Or, I could take on the headache now of writing the code so the text and buttons I wanted would automatically show up on every new blog post I create.

If I wanted to change it, I'd only have to make changes to the code and it would update everywhere. So that's the option I chose. Yes, it was unexpected work "in addition to" the other stuff I'm currently working on—but only temporarily. Hard-coding the side-by-side buttons into a new web template for my site became an "instead of," because it's saving me from enormous manual upkeep.

That's the kind of keeping up we like.

onward.

-dmac