Yesterday somebody asked me how my weekend was. Upon thought, I realized that all I had done this past weekend was work on my website, which traditionally, would not bear the likeness of a “good” weekend. The difference this past weekend, however, was that I had finished my website, thereby making it in fact, a very good weekend. This satisfaction, however, came at no small cost, and I’m assured my life will continue to endure no shortage of technological hardships.
I used to believe that I was technologically savvy. The lie in this has been made painfully clear but I cannot discern whether my skill set actually never existed or that the landscape of web design has changed so much that my skill set simply became obsolete. Either way, this weekend found me toiling for hours upon hours (at least 5 hours at a time) on singular tasks for my site. How can it take 5 hours to put up a web gallery, you ask? Well, merely finding a plug-in for a web gallery, installing it, and applying it sounds so deceivingly simple, it’s almost evil.
Here is how the process becomes a part-time job. First of all, browsing the internet for that perfect gallery is a feat in itself. You find yourself wading through an ocean of features, options, designs, installation variables, compatibility variables, limitations, possibilities, and before long, you find yourself simply “picking something!” So you go ahead and install “the one.” And it doesn’t work. You pore over the installation steps again and again, repeating steps that you know are superfluous, but at a loss for answers, you follow the steps to the letter. Your next line of defense comes in the form of forums and discussion boards. You implore Google to show you someone who has experienced this same tragedy, hoping that you can benefit from their misfortune, saving yourself the hours that it probably cost them. You read forum thread after forum thread, trying out suggestions and tossing them like you’re trying on jeans when you’re too fat. Most likely, you give up on your perfect gallery, deciding that it’s high time you moved on. Bruised but refusing to give up, you begin the process all over again.
What has ensued for me is a collection of variations of this pattern, wherein I am installing, trying out, and uninstalling candidates for the task [in this case, displaying photos in a gallery] for some reason or other. The most frustrating thing is not knowing. Not knowing exactly why something is not working, or even why something suddenly did work for that matter. Not knowing if what you envision is achievable and thus whether or not you’re giving up for the right reasons. So much of this is poking around in the dark and trial and effort.
And I haven’t even delved into issues that involve templates, style-sheets, and pHp files, all of which, when fiddled with in error, can jeopardize your site’s very existence. For several terrifying moments on Sunday, my site experienced temporary death. An attempt at domain forwarding also caused my site’s url to malfunction, essentially rendering my site unviewable. How could I have known that you can’t forward a domain to a page on the same domain?!
At some point, sometimes for reasons you do or do not know, you achieve your desired result. At this point, you are most likely bleary-eyed, the last one in the cafe, on your third purchase of coffee as you reached your wifi access limit multiple times, and so weary that you cannot even celebrate. In a twisted combination of sweet success and the tragedy of hours lost in internet oblivion, you close your laptop and crawl home. Web design: the bane of my existence. I can’t wait until I hire my own designer.
