I realized, when I was working on the new version of this site, that I wanted to have a listing of categories for the posts here.  Which was a great idea, but we hadn’t been using categories.  So that meant I was going to have to not only come up with the categories that would describe all of our posts, but I was going to have to go back and tag every single post in the archive with the right category. I just now finished.

“Gosh, Montoure,” you might be saying, “wasn’t that kind of tedious?” I’m glad you asked, imaginary voice inside my head, and the answer is — VERY.  But it’s done now! Yaaay!

So what motivates me to do it?  Why do I put this kind of work into the site?

Well, aside from the fact that Ralph Fontaine and Glynis Mitchell can become cranky and unmanageable if I let things here slide for too long, there’s the flip-side of that — they say such lovely things when they like what I’ve done.

Over on Twitter, Ralph said:

HOLY CRAP, you guys! Check out the upgraded @watchcausality site! @montoure did an awesome job! bit.ly/evGYxQ

— Ralph Fontaine (@rfontaine71) June 1, 2012

And later:

@josephinehoy thanks! I’m stoked to see how great it looks. @montoure and his mad web design skills rocks!

— Ralph Fontaine (@rfontaine71) June 1, 2012

Over on Facebook, Glynis simply called it, “Beautiful.”

Let me contrast this with another project I worked on, once upon a time. I’m not going to name any names here, but it was another website that I worked on for free, this time as a favor for someone else rather than for one of my own projects.

In all the time I worked on it, I don’t remember the person I worked for saying “please” or “thank you” even once. That’s probably an exaggeration, but that’s the way it feels looking back on it. I do remember that whenever I asked for feedback on something new I made for the site, I’d get criticism and requests for changes, but not so much as a “nice job!”

As you might guess, when the opportunity came along to do more free work for this person after the first website was done, I politely suggested they find someone else.

My CAUSALITY partners, on the other hand, not only give me warm praise, they do it in public. Who would you rather work for?