httpwebwitch - 2:42 pm on Dec 19, 2008 (gmt 0)

buckworks, I agree with you completely, and trillianjedi you nailed it. I totally identify with the "inventor type" - I have at any given time a dozen half-finished hobby projects, any of which could be churned into a viable product. I guess the reason is that when a new idea inspires me, I start working on it immediately, sketching in a rough underpainting (the canvas is my Apache localhost, the pigments are the 5 primary colours HTML,CSS,PHP,SQL,JS). Sometimes I get a working prototype done, sometimes not. But starting the project is important - if I don't do that initial rough sketch, the idea might be lost, and to my personality the loss of a good idea is greater than the loss of opportunity by leaving it unfinished.

Seriously, I have unfinished website projects dating back to 1996. One of the earliest is a music theory textbook, 200 interactive pages, collecting dust on my hard drive.

Fortune Hunter:

There are also cases where someone has A LOT of good ideas and simply doesn't have time to put all of them into play. Not a bad place to be either as long as some of the better ones make it to the production phase.

That's me.

I do have several that I've taken to completion, or at least to the point where they're running live on the www. I am very proud of those. But what if I were to take all the time I devote to sketching dozens of in vitro concepts, and spend that time focused on one project?

Every once in a while, I do "dump" piles of dead projects. It's like spring cleaning. It often means also dumping domains that I earmarked for those projects. Only once have I regretted it - an early "wiki" project for which I had a killer .com, that I wish I had back again.