Once upon a time there lived a girl with a terrible curse. The girl--let's call her Sara--was simply unable to do anything the easy way.

"I'll make a website!" she said one day, full of good intentions. "But static pages are so last century. I need a content management system."

Happy to have found an easy solution for once, Sara installed a CMS--but it was no good! She hated the blog format. She thought the templates were ugly. Dissatisfied, she tried another, then another! It was to no avail.

"This one doesn't have enough flexibility!" she cried. "And that one is too expensive! This one has a terrible user interface, and that one I can't understand at all!" Some of the installs were almost right, but always she found them lacking.

"Why can't I find a CMS with support for footnotes and bibliographies? What if I don't want to hard-code links and images? Why aren't any of these standards-compliant?" The more she thought about it, the more features Sara couldn't imagine living without.

It was the curse, of course.

Finally the doomed words escaped her lips: "I'll just write my own CMS. That way it will do everything I want! I already know PHP and database design. This will be easy!" And with that, Sara went to work.

At first all seemed to go well, as she created a feature list and began drafting design documents. Planning is so much fun! It didn't take long, though, for the curse to rear its head.

"I know I want to store pages in a database," Sara thought, "but databases are a bottleneck. What are best practices for serving pages from a DB? How do I design for high traffic load? Is there a standard architecture for this? Is it scalable? I can't possibly write code until I know more!"

Sara couldn't bear to do anything the wrong way, you see. And the more she researched, the more unknowns she found. Caching! Stored procedures! Plugins! Worst of all, she found...new web standards!

"I'd never even thought about accessibility issues," she despaired. "Obviously I'll need to include that. And there's a new version of PHP that better supports objects, so I'd better scrap what I have and do an object-oriented design."

All this time, Sara still had a Real Job and a Real Life. As the CMS project grew larger and larger, it became harder to find time to work on it. "I'll just wait until next month, after that next deadline," she thought. "Then I'll be able to spend a few hours redesigning this so I understand what to do next."

The few free hours never arrived. Whenever she tried to work on the project, a new design paradigm had become popular on the internet, and Sara had to start all over again.

Finally she had enough. "That's it!" she growled, "I don't care if this is a good design or not. I'm just going to finish what I have and see if it works. I'm not going to worry about AJAX or Ruby or query optimisation until later." But when she tried to do just that...

It had been so long since she'd looked at her code that she didn't remember how it worked!

And that is the story of why chicazul hasn't had a website since 2003.