'Read the Damn Script', AKA 'Journey to the South Poll'
As I have already mentioned several times, I intend to revamp my website a great deal. A few people consider my journal here to be my web page. In a manner, I guess that's more or less true, as it's been the only web presence of mine that I've made any effort at maintaining. Also it shares many of the components of my real page, the color scheme and the journal is embedded in its home page.
But, no. My journal is not my personal site. That creature is one I've struggled with for years and more or less gave up on when I moved to Portland. My problem has always been that I hate coding. Its boring, tedious, thankless work. In turn, I don't like writing markup languages and so Ive always relied on visual designer programs to do the work for me, which really meant more struggling than was necessary to get a simple page template down and ending up with a result that looked vaguely like what I was going for but was ultimately hollow on the inside except for the mess that is automatically generated code.
It still functions. It's still there. Teverant.furtopia.org If you've ever been to my page proper before, you're not going to see anything new.
There's some content to see, there are potential sections that never got added. The truth is that the program I was using to build the site expired and the company behind it went away, and I was left with proprietary files that nothing else could work with. That's means to frustration that'll end updates to a site real quick.
Anyway, manually writing out a page is a necessary evil, and so I'm learning it all from the ground up. I apparently remember more than I thought I did, or am at least observant, because I'm able to fix all the intentional errors in the example code before it's mentioned that I'm supposed to do so. Once I've got a steady handle on XHTML, it's off to cascading style sheets, and from there I should have a new, better page, which will of course get shown here. It will also probably mean a revamping of my LJ to follow suit.
On a side tidbit, the Touch Mobile LJ App sucks. Hard. It's only usable for the most basic of journal uploads and quick comments. I'll still use it, but it's worth little more than what I just said. Good thing it's free. I guess I shouldn't complain about it a great deal on that note.
It also just occurred to me that I can put polls in here, seeing as how I'm a paid account holder and all that. So I will. I realize that I've said that I don't care if anyone reads my journal or not, and that remains true, but knowing if anyone actually does or not would be helpful to me by knowing how I should angle the content. There's all sorts of stuff I'd like to share here other than just what's going on in recent events, like annoying memes and 'Heythisiscoollook' sort of stuff. Also, if people actually look here every once in a while, I'd post more original art content and such. You'd like that, right? Then answer the damn poll at the bottom of the page and participate.
Now, it's not lost on me, the hypocritical nature of the predicament I've set up. I know I don't comment or otherwise interact in other people's journals very often, just like I don't really do anything on Facebook other than approve or deny friend requests. I'm working on that, on multiple angles of my web presence, since it's my only real communication anchor with many of you. But these things do work both ways. Admittedly, I'm a little self conscious, so, when I post and post and get nary a comment on my journal it makes me think that maybe I should just make the thing private and stop pretending that I'm talking to a living audience.
It's just a single click, man, Jeez... Don't give me that face. I'll send you to the office!
Poll