Obey the Voices

I dabble in web design. (Yes, dabble. Just like everything else I do. "Jack of all trades and master of none," that's me.) I've only been at it for about a year, and I've only been doing it the right way for 6 or 8 months. I was taught the basics by a friend (who is still my long-suffering tech support) and from there I've been homeschooled, fueled by the forgiving souls who have entrusted their sites to me. I thought about buying a book to learn from, but never got to it. A couple of months ago, I picked up a good one on HTML and CSS at a yard sale for 50 cents. Guess what? I've hardly cracked it open. Who needs books? It's all out there on the great www.

Look, I know this is boring, but it's my blog, and I feeling ranty.

So I've been working on a site for my neighbor's machining business. I'm soooo slow. But now I have a self-inflicted deadline. I want this thing done by the time we leave for Oregon. Done. Uploaded. Please.

I've just about got the layout all, well, laid out, and I'm almost ready to start adding content. That's the easy part, the content. Knock wood. The layout is a bear. A big, stubborn, bear who refuses to co-operate no matter how I tug and plead. A bear like that, he'll come when he's good and ready.

A little while ago today I was polishing things up and I was having a problem where my centered 800 pixel content div (container) was shifting 1 pixel left in Firefox and 1 pixel right in Explorer. ARG! It was very noticable due to backgrounds and colors an such. I fought and I struggled and the bear sat down on his haunches and laughed. (Bears do laugh, you know.)

I got up and went to make tortillas. In the process, I discovered that Jonah had snatched yet another cookie. (I hardly ever make cookies, so he has very little control when I do. Well, neither do I.) Why even bother making supper when we are filled up on oatmeal chocolate chip cookies made with spelt flour and sucanat and baked just until chewy perfection? Mmm... cookies...

Uh, where was I? Oh, I was makeing tortillas. And I was ranting in my head at the people who made browsers and couldn't make them all just agree already and I threw in some rants to the poeple who wrote the standards, and heck, the whole code in the first place.

Just then, the schitzoid in my head yelled back, "So just set the width at eight hundred and ONE pixels!"

So, I dropped everything, and ran to the laptop and did just that.

And guess what? It worked. I don't know why. But it did.

I know, I know, "garbage in, garbage out." It was only doing what I told it to and apparently, I told it to take out the trash.

Still. Those tech-nerds should have asked ME about the most logical way to write this crud before they wrote it. I think I could learn them a thing or two about a thing or two...

Anyway, I would rather cook that design websites, so that is why I'm going to go finish my tortillas and make some Pico de Gallo to go with them.