I started trying to do some stuff on my site last night (mostly involving forms and validation and stuff like that), and I got stressed out and gave up.

This website is the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on, and I’m really, really proud of the fact that I haven’t given up with it. It’s probably the longest project I’ve ever embarked on and I’m still interested in it and want it to be better. That’s impressive for me, the girl with the attention span of a gnat.

But it just gets harder, the things I want to do get more complicated and the code becomes much more of a foreign language. I find programming really difficult because I understand all the components, I just can’t work out how they fit together. When Mr C shows me how it’s done, it makes perfect sense, but when I’m faced with a blank editor… nothing.

There are so many little things that can be wrong with PHP: entering code one line out of place or in the wrong order, forgetting to open or close brackets, even one single missing quote will throw the whole thing off. And my browser has real trouble bringing up a helpful error and will often just stop. I don’t mind doing things wrong, but a gentle nudge in the right direction might be helpful?

I get frustrated when it doesn’t work, and I can’t see how to fix it, and I eventually switch it all off and sulk, until I’ve calmed down enough to ask Mr C to tell me where I’ve gone wrong. He does, and he’s incredibly patient about it but I know I’m starting to get on his nerves… yesterday he told me to find a new hobby.

And he’s right, maybe I should. I mean, yes, it is the one thing that I’ve actually stuck at for over two years, and yes, it does make me happy to see people commenting (okay, it’s just my mother so far, but still…) and yes, it does give me somewhere to display my nice pictures and my thoughts. It’s also a nice indoor hobby (indoors good, outside bad) that keeps me occupied when there’s no Big Brother to watch.

But the flip side to this is that I’m really not cut out to be a programmer. I do have a limited amount of patience when it comes to certain tasks, but this does not involve staring at some code that I don’t understand trying to find an unkown error that I’m not going to know how to fix.

I just feel stupid. Maybe it’s time that I let it go and find a hobby that doesn’t leave me feeling stressed and miserable. I don’t want to give up, I don’t want to stop writing, but I suppose… there’s always Blogger.