Why I hate trying to delegate work...

Ugh. So I tried to delegate some of the "job" (entirely volunteer) of getting podcasts up for my church to someone that was suggested by one of the office staff members. I'm trying VERY HARD to be patient and not blow up at this person, which the pregnancy hormones and frustration with being alone with a toddler with approximately 300 times my energy level NOT helping maintain my cool even when the temperature DOES stay below 75 degrees... I had specifically asked this person to follow the steps in the tutorial I created (I even did a long and short version of the tutorial in case people involved were total beginners or a bit more experienced). Apparently all that the person retained was "this is the username and password, log in and click the words create content then audio" - the files that are getting created are NOT being named according to the naming conventions I specified (which enables them to be sorted by the date of service instead of whatever random order the files were actually created - it's too easy to have a stack of CDs get out of order when they get backlogged, which of course they did as soon as I tried to job share... I'd been getting them created and uploaded before I left the building before this, then none got created for over a MONTH because the CDs kept disappearing so I couldn't do it myself... *headdesk* *headdesk *headdesk*). The URL Path isn't getting set to ANYTHING so the URL winds up being something random instead of something the office staff who upload the text of the sermons to the main church website can predict and incorporate easily into their workflow. And the title line's been being changed instead of leaving it to the code that I had inserted to take the information from the ID3 tags.

Classic case of RTFM, and since in this case *I* created the "FM" in question, I'm fuming. But it's "just" a volunteer thing, so I can't get mad, right? Grr.... *I* am doing this as a volunteer... donating space on my own server, paid for the domain name registration myself (it's totally separate from the main church website, over which I have zero control), I took the time to create the instructions and try to organize it to be user-friendly (for the end-users, uploaders, and office staff)... and it got ignored by the first person to agree to help. I created all this so that if I get totally distracted with the new baby, I can hand the job off to someone else and trust that it will be done similarly to how I'd been doing it for continuity of the users (mind you, some of these download counts are already indicating that about 1/4th of the number of people showing up on an average Sunday are also listening online - we generally have ~200 people on a Sunday morning and a lot of the download counts are over 50, it's only been online since January and I think it wasn't even mentioned in the church newsletter until April... plus the download counts get reset when I mess with the back-end stuff sometimes).

So... what do I do? I'm trying to gently get through to this person that it needs to be standardized for several reasons, but I'm not sure it's getting through. I'm trying to remember if it was this past Sunday or the Sunday before that we spoke during coffee hour, but the other person hasn't taken the initiative to go in and edit the parts that they did wrong yet, so I'm trying to fix it up since I was working on some back-end stuff anyway (while waiting for Liam to snooze so I can work on the other computer where I'm doing some graphic manipulation that's sitting in a partially finished state - love that ctrl-s key combination). I'm not the most diplomatic person by nature, and I've been known to totally steamroller people when I get going, so I'm trying not to piss this person off so much that they decide they don't want to do it at ALL, but at the same time, I'd rather no one else was messing with it if they're not going to do it in a way that actually saves my having to redo it all anyway, ya know? *sigh*

Well, for those readers who DON'T actually go to church with me (or who missed those Sundays) at least one of the services I delivered is up on the website here... notice the standardized URL with the date of the service . I may be a narcissist and upload the others later if I feel like it, I really should probably be working on my own photography website more (I plan to advertise for portrait customers toward the end of summer, if we get the the attic studio set up enough for people to come here at least some of the time). My hosting company increased the storage and bandwidth drastically (from 5gb storage and I think 100gb transfer per month to 200gb storage and I think 2000gb transfer per month, as well as dropping the yearly subscription price by $5) so I'm feeling some momentum to actually accomplish stuff on the sites... I've been uploading pictures to yeungs.us, working on getting Garvin's family tree (which is all in Chinese, of course) uploaded so the extended family all have access to it, but that's been not working for some reason.


Liam's asking for apple juice, gotta go.