small thoughts about a small site

Monday, apr. 10, 2006   |   0 comments

This past week I’ve been working on putting together a miniature website for the Language of Sleep book. It’s been a good six or eight years since I’ve even thought about designing a site, and my web know-how is definitely very “1998” (and not in the good “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea“ sense but the bad “These Are Special Times“ sense…though lord knows I have a special hole in my heart for Celine Dion, much as I do for the <td> tag). So I decided that maybe it was time to finally step up to stylesheets? Ugh? After endless fiddling, and many failures, and much badgering of my more advanced web friends (Gene and Mike bearing the most painful brunt of it), I finally managed to cobble something together. It’s a very small site, just five pages wide, which seems embarrassingly scant considering the effort. And it isn’t going to win any design awards, and I’m sure if you viewed my source (careful! that’s how web people get pregnant!), you’d be scandalized by the Frankenstein of code. But it loads on all my browsers on all my computers, including the Sidekick, and who knew how happy just that could make me?

Also I’d forgotten how much I liked the puttering — selecting link colors, FTPing things over and over again, reloading pages, cleaning and shrinking things in Photoshop, viewing other people’s source, and searching the web for how to do baby stuff like “put space between columns.”

And then there’s that particularly dynamite sensation of having a page keep breaking and breaking, and you just can’t figure out what’s wrong, and you’re going nutso trying to find the problem, combing over this mess of nested tags and moving things around and retyping words, but nothing seems to work. Finally, finally, FINALLY you find it: oh, you typed a “-” instead of an “=” and that’s all it took to make the whole world explode. There’s almost nothing like it, that scratched-itch relief of locating and correcting something so small. Finding the exact right analogy for a complicated thought is almost as good, or getting yourself the exact right meal to meet a highly particular craving. Maybe doctors or dieticians feel it, when they finally come up with the right treatment for a thorny and chronic health problem? But key to the greatness of the sensation is the huge buildup of inscrutable frustration that comes before it. It’s like…when I was a kid, in the summer, I used to wear my down jacket to the pool just to heighten the relief and glee of the moment when I finally jumped in the water. This is the glory of building a webpage!