Test, test, test.

Oh, I can be so silly. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. 

I use the rather wonderful Squarespace for my blog. I really love it; it isn’t free like Wordpress but in my opinion the cost is more than balanced out by great ease-of-use and powerful tools. 

I’ve been really excited about the new Squarespace Version 6 that is in beta. It looks so fantastic! Wowza. And the social integration is great. A few months ago I requested a beta invitation and I got one!

And thus the trap closes. 

It started innocently enough. I had a few spare minutes today between meetings and thought, what the heck? I’ll upgrade my blog. The beta has been running for months — I’m sure the kinks are sorted out. Right? Right?!?

I logged in, chose an awesome new template, and hit migrate. This is going to be awesome! And then… 90 minutes of panic and frustration ensued as — of course — none of the pictures migrated over correctly, the new user interface left me confused, and my custom domains were changed. The blogger’s worst nightmare: Editing your DNS entry. It means something has gone wrong. Very wrong.

It’s all sorted out now and I’m mostly feeling stupid for ignoring the advice I give my clients: Test, test, test!

That new blog is going to be awesome. The toolset looks incredible. But I think I’ll experiment first…

Update: No one needs to hear you say you were right.

You probably were, and you probably saw it coming a mile away. Whatever it is — the big failure, the big success, the huge win, the huge obstacle — yep, you probably called it weeks ago. Whoa! You were way out in front of that one!

But the moments when you are most tempted to say “HA! I knew it!” are probably the moments when you most need to close your mouth, inhale your hubris, and slowly chew your words. You’ll have a bigger impact by saying, “Hey, how could anyone have known? We all did it. Let’s move forward together.”