But It Needs to be Fabulous!

I'm seriously trying to update the layout of this page, and it's proving challenging. For those of you who do not know, I'm a programmer, but I'm back in the world of Windows, which means my web page skills have had a few months of entropy. Now, I'm trying to figure out how this page should look, and worse, how to get that to happen.

I think I've overcome the first hurdle, which is graphics. I'm a firm believer in not getting sued, so the idea of simply pilfering graphics from another site was out. This is kind of ironic, given the piratey theme I have in mind here. Still, I had to figure out how to make my own graphics.

Enter The GIMP. For those of you who don't know, The GIMP is not the guy in a leather mask who lives in a box downstairs, but is an open source answer to Photoshop, which is a good thing to know because I don't have six hundred bucks for a copy of Photoshop and, just between us, the guy in the basement blows at graphics. I have located several spiffy tutorials on creating some of the effects I'm shooting for here, so there's that.

Graphics only get you so far though - actually making the page do what I want is the next challenge, and I shudder to think what that's going to take. See, I'm a firm believer that all web pages should be styled with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for the non-geeks), which is a good thing. It separates all of the content from the styles, and makes it easier to update things. Well, it's supposed to anyway.

The problem with CSS is that it's extremely powerful, which means it's extremely complex, and the support for it is iffy at best. I'm okay at it, but I'm by no means a master at it. I'll go to a lot of trouble, and when it looks just the way I want it to, I'll open it in something other than Firefox, and it looks like doody. (Again, for the non-geeks, "looks like doody" is something they teach us when they teach CSS and means that something is less than ascetically pleasing. The more you know and all that.) So committing to putting that together is a serious endeavor, and with time always being at a premium for me, I haven't began to blaze that particular trail.

So why am I telling you all of this? Is it because I wanted to let you know that this blog being attractive to all of you is important to me? Is it because I want to stand out from all of the other, templated blogs in my attempt to draw attention to myself? Is it filler because I had nothing else to talk about today? Wait, forget I asked that last question.

Seriously, I do want this to look good. I've never had my own web site, and while this isn't exactly a web site, it's close, and I'd like it to look like it's run by someone who knows what their doing. Fortunately for me, I don't feel the need to actually know what I'm doing. I just need to make it look like I do. Which pretty much sums up my life.