Rodent Regatta

Cameron Moll has written Eight things I wish Id known when I started. They are great design tips. Here they are in a pdf file.

This set of support forum entries contains a hint that we might see Textpattern 1.0 sometime before next week. From the current gamma 1.19 to a version 1.0, we might see some truly sensational features. Stay tuned. It’s probably going to give us a lot more to learn.

In the two and a half years that I’ve been writing a weblog, I have never set one up from scratch by myself. I’ve always had help. Tonight, I faced the fact that in that same period of time there are quite a number of people who have had three or four (or more) weblogs and weblog designs running on different weblog tools.

I’m still trying to figure out what to put on a Notepad page to make a vertical line appear on a web page. I’m still not sure how the width of a weblog’s text is established. I couldn’t move a sidebar from the right side of a weblog to the left side if my life depended upon it.

It’s been terribly frustrating. I want to comply with standards, but I can’t figure out my RSS/Atom/RDF files. I want to use CSS, but I can’t determine how to right or left justify information. I’ve never edited a digital photograph. I’ve never used Photoshop to accomplish anything.

In spite of all the reading, all the books bought and all the sites visited, I’m no closer to figuring out why my comments show one domain while my weblog shows another. I’m no closer to understanding why a link inside a comment opens in a window that cannot be resized or navigated.

Sometimes it makes me wonder if I’ve learned anything at all. How is it that other people have mastered four or five weblog tools, developed complete designs and made all of it validate? My approach must be wrong, because I’m not getting anywhere.

Dan Rubin is planning a redesign of SuperfluousBanter and a new set of contributions to the web design community. Dan’s one of the people in my top 10 designers list (which has 30 names in it).

There is a wealth of information and instruction in Mike Davidson’s latest entry and the comments that follow.

I’m still arguing with myself about the notion of trying to modify my site design myself vs. sticking by a tried-and-true designer. If I don’t do it myself, I fear I’ll never learn this stuff. If I do try to do the work myself, I expect there to be long outages and flaws as I go through the trial-and-error of figuring things out.

If I didn’t have such an interest in standards-based design, the choice would be clear. I do and it isn’t.