Last week I wrote a blog post about a new trick that I thought I had discovered for making Aweber Blog Broadcasts have an automated table of contents.

Here’s the thing:

• It worked in theory (the worst of all benchmarks ;-)
• It worked when I used Aweber‘s testing tools
• It broke badly when it got sent out live to my subscribers

Picture the scene.  I wake up at 5am to catch an early flight to Melbourne, grab a quick coffee and check my email, and see my badly mangled blog broadcast that has just gone out to my entire list.  And I can’t do anything about it because I have to get to the airport.

And worse still, I had already published a blog post trumpeting my awesome new trick and spread it around on forums and social networks.

I spent the entire time driving to the airport and sitting in the waiting lounge thinking about what I had done wrong.  The critical step that I missed when I set out to solve that little problem of making my blog broadcasts look better.

I forgot to fully test it on my test site first.

You’ve got a test site, haven’t you?  A second WordPress blog installed somewhere for you to try out new things before you put them on your real blog?  I’ve actually got a few.  I use them to test different themes, code samples, plugins, and I’m also supposed to use them to test things like changes to my mailing list settings.  I didn’t this time, and the results were a bit deflating to say the least.

On that same plane ride I was listening to This Week in Tech, and one of the guests made the comment “Its the pioneers who have arrows in their butts”.  Heading that made me think differently about what had just happened to me.

Now I’m no pioneer, not by a long shot, and thats not what I took from that quote.  Instead what I really heard was “Its the people who take chances and try new things that get stung when things go wrong”.

I tried something new and it didn’t go well.  But its really no big deal.  Fix it and keep going.  Sure I’ll probably be a little more careful about using my test sites first, but you can’t always test everything and sometimes you need to just put it out there and let the world see your mistakes.  Otherwise you get stuck in a rut as you wait for the perfect moment to do anything different or new.

So take it from me, someone with a few arrows in his butt, keep trying new things to make your blogs better, because thats what this game is all about.

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Inspiration