Can I click my heels and get this?

You ever really want to be capable of something that you’re positive you’ll never achieve?

I’m a guy who constantly has ideas yet never has the capability to make them come to life. Most of my ideas are web based and nothing ground breaking but if I were capable of putting that idea into an actual working form, I feel they would be useful to some people. Yet, I’m cursed with not having any knowledge of a programming language and this horrible inability to focus enough to learn.

I’ve spent this weekend reading online manuals for Ruby on Rails and trying to get an environment set up on my laptop to assist me in learning it, yet I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anywhere. I started doing something I’ve never done before, taking notes while I read. That seems to help a tiny bit but I’m guessing I don’t get very far anyway.

I’m also faced with the design aspect of things. Of all my ideas, the most I’ve ever done is scribble down a huge list of possible functions of these apps and never anything else. As I stand back and look at them, they’re usually lists full of unnecessary bobbles that the user won’t ever touch. If my reading this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that I tend to over complicate things that don’t need to be.

On the design note, my father needs a website built for his business and of course he turns to his son who runs a big car website and therefore must know how to do such things. Sadly, I’ve never churned out a website worth it’s weight in my entire time fiddling with HTML. I barely know CSS or how to properly leverage it into making my code actually look decent. So I find myself staring at design sites tonight praying for a spark of something, anything, to ignite my creative juices and let me have some breakthrough to use for my dad’s website.

Have I mentioned I’ve not drawn out an idea in years? I remember scrawling some basic shapes on a piece of paper in the past but it seems like years since I’ve even tried to come up with a UI to go with an idea. This week I hope to break that as I need to sketch out a plan for my dad’s site.

So with that, I urge you to read this if you have any plan of ever churning out anything web related. It’s a good book and free if you don’t mind reading it on your computer screen. Getting Real by 37Signals.