I was feeling a bit off earlier this morning, and took it easy on my food intake for the day. Even managed a nap in there for self-care. But after watching two episodes of Bear Grylls’ Eco-Challenge show tonight for relaxation, I was feeling a bit better for the day, and decided to double-down on a layout issue.

I mentioned previously that I’m getting organized for a large project related to music reviews, although it is more about getting myself better organized so that I can peck away at it a bit here and a bit there. I have a few projects like that under way, and each one requires a bit of planning to get it going.

For the musical review one, I never really liked a format I was using, a big “ugly” table, albeit with an option to make it sortable. I did a bunch of searching yesterday for the right tool, found an option, discarded it, and decided tonight to rethink the design.

What I really needed was my raw data file. I thought I knew where I had saved it but when I went to the folder, I could find only 1944. No 1943 data. Looked all through my folders, a couple of other places, backups even, nada. I started to think I had maybe moved some files at some point, and deleted a folder without making sure it was empty. Nope, I was more efficient than that. I had apparently merged my 1943 data into a larger Excel file so it was all in one place. Which meant when I opened the oddly-named file and found 1944, I thought that was the end of it. Not noticing that 1943 was just another tab. Doh!

I played with some setups, and then into the old web file I went. Only to have it crash on me again. WTH? I thought it had been a design flaw, but now I felt it was something else. A coding problem somewhere in the file. One of my multiple plugins had converted it over at some point in the past, and well, it glitched. I don’t know how or where, but it did.

So I created a fresh new file, copied the original text to a notepad file in order to delete any weird codes, pasted it into the new file, and voila! All fixed. Sigh. Which means I probably COULD have left it in the old format and just used a different / fresh file for that too.

Which now means I have to go back and decide if I want to revamp the design the new way or go back to the old.

I solved it, then I unsolved it, then I solved it again, and now I can do it either way. Has anyone else’s head exploded yet?

Today I choose to design a new layout. I just don’t know which one I’m going to use.

Which choices are you making today?