Two Banjos At Once: The Blog

Living with standards compliance

My First Web Page

September 21, 2009

Tags: , , , , , ,

Some digging in a dusty file box the other day yielded no fewer than three floppy disks. What wisdom might these ancient tablets convey? Fortunately, there was at least one device in the house which still had a floppy drive. Result: mostly disappointment. The files were either first drafts of things I’d sent off to magazine editors in the late 1990s, or grouchy letters to my landlords of the same era. However, there was, archived with apparent pride, my first effort as a Web developer.

Step into the WABAC Machine. The year is 1997. I was the admin assistant for a team of software engineers. I was also something of a mascot; if the guys (yup, all guys, except for me) had a noncritical technical task they thought I could handle with a little instruction, they threw it to me, because I guess I looked really grateful to be doing something besides ordering lunch and taking the abusive phone calls of the company CEO. The most enduring instructions they gave me was how to use FTP, IrfanView, and NotePad to develop the team Web site. Of course, these tools seemed insufficient once I made a few changes–I wanted colors! Silly typefaces! Dizzying background images! And HTML seemed so hard to learn…

I remember downloading a lot of trial versions of the trendy WYSIWYG software of the time: an early version of Frontpage (which had me puzzling over these things called “stylesheets”), Adobe PageMill, and the editor which came with Netscape Gold. The one I used the most seemed to be NetObjects Fusion, which I notice is still available. It was a big, handholding, friendly giant of a program; it set everything into tables and FONT tags, and we were buddies. I felt masterful.

Nobody I worked with was a Web professional–no designers, no information architects, no UI devs. Creating Killer Web Sites had only just been published, Web Pages That Suck was treated mostly as a humorous diversion, and even Jakob Nielsen was as yet rather obscure to the average person making a Web page. It was in this Wild West environment that I devised this:
My First Web Page

I’ll enhance that retro atmosphere with a sample of its markup:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.03 [en] (WinNT; I) [Netscape]">
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Page-Enter" CONTENT="revealTrans(Duration=1,Transition=6)">
   <TITLE>ES Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BACKGROUND="amoeba.jpg">

<CENTER>
<H1>
<FONT FACE="Wide Latin"><FONT SIZE=+4>Engineering Services</FONT></FONT></H1></CENTER>

<CENTER><IMG SRC="grey_dots.gif" ALT="grey_dots.gif (6699 bytes)" HEIGHT=47 WIDTH=890></CENTER>

<CENTER><FONT FACE="HELVETICA"> </FONT></CENTER>

<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="HELVETICA"><FONT SIZE=+2><A HREF="[...]">ES
Quote Status</A></FONT></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="HELVETICA"><FONT SIZE=+2><A HREF="[...]">Current
ES Status Report</A></FONT></FONT></LI>

Yeah, go on. Snort, carp, whatever. But this is how we did things then, back when browsers “innovated” with crap like BLINK and MARQUEE. A year later I was back to using text editors–haven’t touched a WYSIWYG since. Just a year later I was using CSS and disdaining FONT, and a year after that I was riding the dot-com boom as it crested. So it’s worth examining your old work product, if only to swell with pride over how far you’ve come since then.

What was your first Web page like?

Elements of a productive work day

July 22, 2009

Tags: , ,

Having spent the past few weeks playing Whac-a-mole on a project, and waking this day with some leftover sanity and a lot of work done, I think I’ve arrived at a framework.

Elements of a productive work day

  1. Turning off clients for IM, IRC, and e-mail. The benefits of working without distractions have been well-publicized.  I’ve long detested trying to work with IM and IRC anyway; this time I decided to enjoy hours of even deeper productivity by turning off e-mail as well except for an hour at 9am, 12pm, and 5:30pm.  Regrettably, many customers/project leads haven’t modernized to this way of working, so expect indignation when you try this.
  2. Queueing up the right tunes in Last.fm.  I prefer instrumental music when I work, since I won’t drift away into parsing lyrics.  Normally, I’m indifferent to classical music, but I like working to it, since it reminds me of being in a classy bookstore, instead of being huddled at a desk sweating over support for :hover in IE7. Strangely, both middlebrow “light” classical and less favored experimental works (try typing in “Delibes” and “Xenakis” into  Last.fm‘s artist search) seemed acceptable background music.
  3. Configuring LeechBlock. I’ve got Firefox hot-rodded with loads of add-ons, and one of the newest to me, and most valuable, is LeechBlock.
    Get back to work

    Get back to work

    It works by blocking your browsing to certain sites after a given time period.  I set mine to a reasonable 25 minutes spent on my favorite time-wasting Web properties.  It’ll probably become a boast or social marker to confess which sites you find so compelling you require LeechBlock to take them away from you.  For the record, mine are Netvibes, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and the New York Times.

  4. Water. Seems so obvious, but a lot of people forget to drink water.  Granted, I’m lucky to have good tap water piped straight from the California mountains, so it’s not hard to choke down.  It also helps to have a glass you like.  Mine is an imperial pint that I refill four times, and which gets re-purposed for a good IPA at the end of the workday.

Think I skipped over something?  Add your suggestions in the comments.

5 Things I’m Doing Nowadays Instead of Working

April 8, 2009

Tags: , , , ,

So, you might’ve been spending the last year or so snoozing under a stalactite in Mammoth Cave, and completely missed the near-hourly utterance of the word “recession,” and now you’re a trite confused that so many millions of Americans with good educations, impressive experience, and opposable thumbs are unemployed. In fact, you could’ve surfaced a few months ago and been confronted with the same puzzler, even the same zombie battalion of former job holders. But not all of us are weathering the economic downturn with Red Vines and Snuggies. Some of us are keeping busy; almost too busy to work.

5 Things I’m Doing Nowadays Instead of Working

  1. Getting my command of JavaScript from 30 to 60. I can write state-of-the-art scripts—for 1998. Rather than continuing to embarrass myself with inline onclick handlers and overdependence on alert() for debugging, I’m devoting extra time to reading everything and anything written by Chris Heilmann and Peter-Paul Koch.
  2. Playing with all those advanced techniques customers never request. To date none of my clients have paid me to use any of the goodies from GitHub or Google Code or the multitude of promising APIs; instead, my workdays are devoted to treating float drops in IE 6 and the like. Now, with only myself to please, I can spend time on more challenging tasks at the keyboard.
  3. Thinking of going back to school. I spend much of my time reading about the built environment, and all of my time using it. I’ve been interested in architecture for many years, yet have no training in it; haven’t worked in the field at all. So what better time to seek retraining than the unbillable present?
  4. Avoiding the news. I stopped my hourly visits to the Web sites for the New York Times and the San Francisco papers because I suspected I was getting too distressed by the dismal stories I read there. I was right —my mood brightened once removed from the daily downbeat. I’m still informed of the things really important to me, and free from concern about those which aren’t.
  5. Going outside. One of the biggest stressors for me when I’m fully employed is that I’m not able to go outside very much during the daytime. Now, with no hypertensive project managers or overdemanding clients to rebuke me, I’m spending a lot of mid-days running, bicycling, or hiking. It’s a pity that work (unless you’re a bike messenger or park ranger) is so often structured to be incompatible with these activities, which are probably the easiest way to regain your enthusiasm for life.

What are you doing instead of working?

Powered by WordPress