Faux Pas
Sun 15 Feb 04
That entry for Jan 14 still sounds a little mushy even after a month; maybe I'll revise it to tone it down, or maybe remove it. Don't know yet. For now though I just thought I'd check in real quick and say hi. Hi. You've probably wondered what happened to me didn't you? Actually, the truth is that whatever readership this site may have acquired is probably long since gone. Back in November I started converting the site to a different file structure -- at first I thought it would only take a couple days so I made the changes on the 'live' site rather than on a backup copy. It's been almost 3 months and the site is still in transition: most of the pages aren't accessible (uh oh). Sorry about that. I committed a faux pas and I apologize whole-heartedly.
The good news is I just spent an hour going through some of the pages replacing 'php' with 'includes' many many times and adding leading forward slashes (/) when needed -- the result being that now the Web Log section is working again. I also have a handful of weblog entries to add to this page but I'll probably wait on those for now and fix the rest of the site first.
During the last few months I've been using most of my free time to work on the TuckerCivic.org website. I do it as a volunteer (that means for free), and they needed a lot of changes, additions, revisions for the big annual membership meeting that's coming up. The site's design isn't what you'd call pretty, but its beauty is in its simplicity. The purpose of the site is to distribute information to the organization's membership and I think I've put together a pretty good foundation for doing that: I organized the menu structure to reflect quality content, I wrote some copy, and I wrote a CMS for members to edit pages themselves without having to know HTML. It's been a good site to work on for gaining experience.
A couple of days ago I started writing a new design for it -- if you're interested you can take a peek at the draft and follow along. I'm attempting to create a professional-looking design and am doing what I can to learn more about the world of Graphic Design in the process. Graphic design is my weakest skillset at this point. I know overall site design concepts, content organization, copy writing, HTML/CSS coding, and some basic programming -- that's everything except for how to make it all look pretty. So my main focus for the near future will be on learning design concepts from the artist's perspective, finding sample designs that look good, and writing some layouts to be proud of.
