Way back in the day – and by that, I mean around 1998-2000 – I used to keep a personal page about the weirdo things we would field from people about their technical issues. This was originally set up on a GeoCities page. Remember that? At the time, it was groundbreaking: a place where you could build an online presence in a “city” where other sites similar to yours also lived. Eventually, I moved the content to its own domain.
The point of this history lesson is that at that time, HTML was language, and the page I maintained and updated weekly required me to go right in to the code and modify it to put in the things I needed to put in. It was a great experience: learning some things from the ground up, troubleshooting what didn’t work after you updated a page and finding that you left a termination code out, and deciding just which h code you wanted to have for the title and headings to make them normal sized or large or gigantic and bold, and so on.
As time passed, of course people developed content management systems in perl and PHP and the world drifted over from doing things in HTML to doing things in other languages, first in raw files and then in applications people developed to make creating and maintaining sites much easier than they had been.
Fast forward to today. We’ve absorbed clients from other hosts over the years, and some of those sites are still anchored in HTML, built by those hosts and then not really updated code-wise, even if they had a maintenance contract with the user. When we inherited those folks, we also inherited the content modification requests. This is forcing me to take a very deep dive back into the brain and go retro on the editing the user wants to have done. I firmly believe that challenges like this keep those brain cells active, and according to “they”, this can only be a good thing.
And now back to that deep pool in the brain, swimming in HTML code.
Until next time, peeps: be well.
I am one of those with an old html site – handcoded & on it’s own domain. My hope for the last several years has been to move it into WP..and think maybe this next year will be the one. One never knows where the time will come from. LOL.
I say the same thing about time. And I keep reading things from people who say “if you really wanted to do write, you would find the time for it”. I think that is probably true for people who spend inordinate amounts of time on social media – and why I gave up that timesink on the personal side – or who spend their time after work plopped in front of a tv. But it’s unfair and a bit insulting to people who work full time or work a couple of jobs, go to school full time, have kids, take care of their relatives, and so on. Instead of just blithely dismissing those folks as some kind of slackers, they should be offering them any advice on how to make it work.
I’d love for them to say, “Hey, prime your mind to be ready to get something done in that 15 minutes you have while the kids are brushing their teeth and getting ready for bed to jot down a sentence or two or sketch out a scene or just a note to remind yourself to give character brown hair. When you’re sitting at a soccer practice, take a notebook and do what you can. If you have 30 minutes between classes, or 30 minutes for lunch at work, take your own food instead of spending half that time in line with all the other people who also have lunch at that time, at whatever nearby joint there is to eat, an get some writing done (and as a bonus, you’re eating food of which you know exactly the nutritional content).”
The above is what I’m going to have to do, in fact, because the job is not affording me any blocks of time that I can use (not lately, anyway, things have been nutty). And sometimes, that’s just the way it is.