Abort? Retry? Fail? Pound Head On Keyboard?

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

This blog sucks.

I want it to look like other blogs -- with a bunch o' links and pithy stuff at left, and photos and USA Today-kinda graphics mixed in with the text.

But I can't figure out this crap, and it's buggin' the hell out of me.

At the last newspaper that employed me, I edited the web site, among way too many other things. The template was pre-designed, just like this one, so all I had to do was copy 'n' paste the stories and upload the photos. Well, wait -- first I had to resize 'em in Photoshop, because if you try to put a four-column newspaper photo on the web it's gonna look like wallpaper.

Anyway, that was it. It was cake. But it wasn't good enough. Since my name was on the sucker ("Web Administrator"), it was damned sure gonna look good. So I got "HTML for Dummies" and learned enough basic coding to put stuff in bold or italic, or make it bigger or smaller, create hyperlinks and e-mail links and -- this was the biggie -- tables, so something like a baseball box score wouldn't look like a math problem.

Thus, I figured applying a similar technique to blogging would produce the results I want. I figured. But nooooooooooo!

This isn't HTML, it's XML. Or at least all the "Navigator" stuff is. And somehow, XML is different than HTML. (Gee, dude, what was your first clue? The 'X' instead of the 'HT'? No wonder you're a freakin' editor.)

Yeah, I've checked out all the helpful links at the top of the Radio editing page. They ain't very helpful. Or, maybe they are, but sometime in the last decade I was absent the day everybody on the planet learned how to write, read and speak as if they were born and raised in Steve Jobs' garage. As for me, when I learned what "nested tags" are, I was so proud I bought a round of drinks for the San Francisco Bay Area. And I apparently haven't learned anything since.

It's weird. In high school, the absolute last thing anybody wanted was to be classified as a geek. Geeks got stuffed into trash cans. They walked alone to every single class, and on the rare occasions you did see them with someone, it was another geek, so you had to look for two trash cans close together. Geeks couldn't run, couldn't hit, couldn't throw and definitely couldn't get back on defense.

Who knew then that the geeks would inherit the earth? Certainly not I. My first college major was engineering, but when they told us about this new thing -- CAD -- I freaked. Computers?!? Nuh-UH! Not this dude! Time for a new major.

In retrospect, that was not my best career move.

But I'm determined not to be Salon Blogs' Weenie of the Month, so I'll probably be here at 3 a.m. trying to figure this out. For the next two weeks.

If you happen to see me online, e-mail me some coffee, willya?

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