I’m normally not an early adopter of new technologies. I tend to think of this as a good thing, but every once in a while, I’m inclined to wonder about that.

If I phrase it as “I’m not into fads,” or “I don’t jump on bandwagons,” certainly these sound like good things, but “I’m not an early adopter” conjures a less positive image.

Not being an early adopter has led me to find my own way around some problems, frequently before (sometimes long before) whatever I might not be adopting early. Once I’ve solved that problem and moved on to other things, when a different way comes along to do something, I might simply not see how it might improve on what I’ve already done.

Let’s consider, for instance, creating and maintaining a web site. Way back in the later half of the 1990’s, I took the time to learn to edit HTML in order to create a personal website.

Learning HTML was not particularly difficult, and though it did evolve and grow in the years since, it has always remained backward compatible with the HTML standard that I learned to work with, before the turn of the century.

Cascading style sheets was an interesting addition to the standard that made it easier to give a website a consistent look and feel across pages. There is more to learn with CSS than with plain HTML, but the results are almost always worth the effort.

The website was always very plain, but it served its purpose quite reasonably well, and when I needed to move it from one system to another, it wasn’t any more difficult than copying files around. Making backups and keeping track of old versions of any files was really also just a matter of copying files (and keeping track of those copies).

Various software existed even then to help automate the task of marking up a document with HTML, but such software invariably created code that would be nearly impossible for any sane human being to maintain, except by continuing to use the software.

My HTML editor of choice has always been nothing more than a plain text editor. Insert any text editor you prefer, and maintaining the web pages is no more difficult than it ever was. Hand maintenance to someone else who prefers a different text editor, and they can just as easily continue to maintain the pages. Get a new favourite text editor, and maintaining web pages is still nothing more than editing text files. But the site always was just a small collection of (rarely updated) static web pages.

In the intervening years, methods to maintain websites have changed. In some cases, rather dramatically. Content Management software became all the rage some time ago. Blogs became A Thing, and then software that had originally been created to facilitate blogging migrated into being content management systems. Very few websites remain that are just a small collection of static web pages. The vast majority of websites now are maintained with content management systems.

I have had some curiosity about whether using a content management system would provide a way to modernize my own web site, and make it even easier to maintain the content. But it’s really nothing more than a vanity website, which I’ve used to share information over the years, but which I’ve always known is rather insignificant. And, to be perfectly honest, I never felt the need to change how I was doing things.

Then I volunteered to help maintain the Atlantic Mensa website. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but of course that meant I was going to need to learn to work with a content management system, because that’s how things are managed on that website. As I write this, I have not yet begun helping with that website, and I am only just now beginning to remake my own website, using a content management system, but this is part of that process. If I’m going to be using specific software to help manage a website, I’m going to work to learn as much as I possibly can about working with that software, because that’s just how I do things.

What I realize with this (with a little more than a slight nudge from other events that I have gone through in the past year), is that this isn’t just about how I manage my personal website. There are various new technologies (software and otherwise, though software stands out because it can so quickly go from the latest “flash-in-the-pan” to just being the way most people do things) and methodologies that I have taken a pass on over the years. In some cases I know that I will continue to do things the way I already do, because it simply works well for me, but there are bound to be others where I’m going to need to remember to just keep a more open mind, and perhaps benefit from broadening my horizon and hopefully learn something new.