I find extremely difficult being aware of the time required for various activities. I usually underestimate the time it takes to do stuff. Maybe the trouble is the delta between the speed of though and the speed of life. Usually life is slower and much more troublesome.An interesting technique for dealing with the troubled nature of real world is to add a margin to you planning. In “Game Development and Production” Erik Bethke suggest to consider a day a week as non-working in the planning so to get estimations that can survive to occasional disasters the universe is so generously filled. I usually do this and I find it is good, nevertheless my estimations tend to be optimistic.
One of the point of being aware of time is to recognize when using something pre-made is faster than rolling your own solution. So at last I have to admit that rewriting a new version of my website software from scratch is not something I can do now.
It is true that since I changed my job I have more time at home, but it is equally true that my main source of development time was in train commuting (notebook PCs rule). And I can’t do software development while driving car (apart from the travel to be much shorter).
So at last I resorted to look around what ready made software could do. I found two package that look promising: Drupal and phpWebSite. Unfortunately both require an SQL database which is not available in my current provider subscription. So I spent a bit of time and found pDB a complete SQL database implementation in PHP.
So now it is only a matter of making one of those package to use pDB and I should be done, fast and easy… wishful thinking 🙂