Okay, so it's been just over a week since I installed the blogging software. I've got several blogs established, I've got folks actually participating in communal discussions, and it's been fun playing with a new toy. The problem? Well, once you learn one new thing, you realize that there's this other, related thing, that you really ought to know more about, and that leads you to an interesting tangent, which cross-connects to this other technology, which leads to discovering something totally unrelated but really cool, and suddenly you're in the middle of this run-on sentence because there's so doggone much fun stuff to figure out and it's an endless quest. And it's all the fault of those crazy standards people...
I mean that in jest, of course. Although I've been uber lax about implementing them, I do (philosophically, at least) support the concept of web design standards. The stumbling block for me has always been time - I've had too much raw content to process, to be able to come up for air and get a better perspective on how that content should be managed. (Ironic, as a better management system would make processing the raw content much quicker and easier. It's a circular situation. I really hate those.) There is structure, of course, to the websites I've built, and I'd like to think the structure is both logical and intuitive. It's the GUI that's the sticky wicket.
When I first installed MovableType (the software used to run the blogs on this domain), I immediately hated the default layout for the main page. Ick. Tres ick, in fact. No offense to the software-maker's efforts, mind you - since the layouts are completely customizable, it makes perfect sense that they'd start with a very plain vanilla template, knowing that users could then apply whatever design changes their hearts desired. Sure enough, right away I went looking for alternate layout designs.
As usual, I wanted to run before I'd learned to crawl; it's a character flaw that annoys me no end, but there you are, it's how I'm wired, and on the upside, I do seem to learn best by doing. The few sites I found which provided alternate blog layout styles for download, were very light on the "how to" department, apparently figuring that if you knew enough to want to download a skin, you'd know how to split out the template from the stylesheet and load them appropriately on your own site. Via my usual trial by fire approach, I figured it out with only a modicum of frustration. Problem was, none of the styles I found really "clicked" for me, aesthetically.
And that's when I discovered that I was gonna have to bite the bullet and learn CSS. (Okay, Pye, you can say "I told you so!" now!)
A few days later and some dollars poorer, yesterday Amazon delivered its latest contributions to my coding shelf. Most of the books are reference manuals, because I love coding dictionaries (that's coding as an adjective, not a verb), but I did order a couple volumes on concept and approach. First up on the reading list? Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing With Web Standards". Amusing guy, Jeff - I like his writing style, which means I'll probably actually read this book straight through instead of piecemeal. And we'll see where the road leads from there...
Posted at March 6, 2004 12:42 PM in Science & Tech