Good sausage link purchase

I've been working my way through a large box of sausage links, and enjoying every moment of it. I bought them in part on a whim, the other part in response to the uninspired, undersized, pale turkey "dogs" I'd bought the week before. I wanted more bang for my sausage buck, and these links have fit the bill.

They came in a plain cardboard box pripented with more Spanish than English. The words I could read ("Delicious!" "Tasty!") convinced me, despite the visions of health-code violations and pig anuses conjured by my companion.

Entry posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 pm
23 comments / permalink

CSS replaced tables... when?

I've been working my way through a large box of sausage links, and enjoying every moment of it. I bought them in part on a whim, the other part in response to the uninspired, undersized, pale turkey "dogs" I'd bought the week before. I wanted more bang for my sausage buck, and these links have fit the bill.

They came in a plain cardboard box pripented with more Spanish than English. The words I could read ("Delicious!" "Tasty!") convinced me, despite the visions of health-code violations and pig anuses conjured by my companion.

Entry posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 pm
23 comments / permalink

Office PA for a day

I'm in the process of redesigning devondelapp.com. What started as a simple, weekend project to embed my journal and add some new content has turned into a complete reeducation on web development methods.

I was once a "professional web designer", in that small-businesses-trying-to-save-a-buck-by-hiring-a-17-year-old way. Back in "the day" (sophomore year of high school, 1996), I cobbled together my first site, a video game review and news source, with tags like <center>, <font>, and yes, I even briefly flirted with <blink>. And it was fine. It looked as good as any other site out there, I thought. In college, my job for the last three and half years was designing and coding sites for a medical department and its many sub-organizations. I had picked up some new knowledge along the way, such as basic CSS, forms and cgi scripts. There were smarter ways, but my already aging knowledge got the job done.

Honestly, I hated coding web sites. Even during those first honeymoon years, I was frustrated to the point of exhaustion by buggy, cross-platform issues (try to get a website to load quickly and look decent in Netscape 3 and IE 3). I stuck with it that long because, well, people want web sites, and designing them was fun. Eventually, I learned to sidestep the common mistakes early and assemble a site with a minimum of headache.

It has been a year and half since I left that job. I haven't missed web design any more than I've missed driving my college beater car (which I loved, and still remember fondly), or Seattle's winter weather. Then one day, a few weeks ago, I get the idea to redesign devondelapp.com. The reason is human enough: I suffer from web site envy.

I frequent the blogs and sites of several successful writers: Ken Levine (MASH, Cheers, The Simpsons), John August (Go, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Pamela Ribon (internet famous, Hot Properties), Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, Chain Reaction), and others. My admiration for their writing has co-mingled and heightened my admiration of their sites. As a writer too, my inferiority has manifested itself in an embarrassment over my own web site. I suppose my thinking behind this project was that though I am not yet as successful as they are, a similarly well-done web site would communicate my like commitment to writing.

How to begin? As all apprentices do: by copying the masters. I combed through their site's code (a quick aside: I found a typo in the code of John August's site, and sent him an email alerting him to it. Imagine how awesome I felt the next day to see a new email in my box from "John August", thanking me. It was just a quick email, but hey, for a very short moment, I was in a dialogue with one of Hollywood's top screenwriters!). After only a single day, I noticed a chilling trend. I recognize almost nothing. Sure, there are still tags, but not the familiar ones I'd used for years. Now it was <div> and <span>. But nothing shook me more than the disappearance of the <table> tag.

The <table> tag was the basis for everything! It was the grid-work that held all my layouts together. To not use the <table> tag would be like asking a contractor to build a house, but he can't use concrete (<table>), wood (<tr>), or drywall (<td>). What the hell is going to hold the house up? Magic?

As it turns out, the answer is yes, and that "magic" is better known as CSS. It's not just for assigning font colors any more! This article, Thinking Outside the Grid, is what really hit it home for me. To reinforce the point, I checked out the code on the pretty, grid-heavy site it was hosted under. Not a table to be seen, anywhere. The future is now.

My initial shock and fear, like that of a caveman stumbling upon a cell phone, has given way to hope that this new layout technology may actually be better than the laborious process I had grown to accept. The first step is to re-create the original layout of this web site, just to see how it works. By the end, I hope I'm thrilled with this magic, and not just cursing my inability to walk with the good writers OR the good web designers.

Entry posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 pm
23 comments / permalink