What is to be done?

I've been following this blog off and on for a a while now. Randy and I are on some of the same mailing lists.

The idea of building a standards compliant web site is very appealing to me and that is my goal eventually. I've been reading up on Jeffrey Zeldman's experiences with converting his site to a standards compliant CSS based site where content and presentation are completely separate. This is where I want to go. I have been building pages using tables for layout for years and it is a huge pain.

I'm sure this will take me a few months to master, but once it's done and I can change the presentation without affecting the content and without having to touch a half a dozen files in order to tweak the tables, I will be able to move on to creating good content for this site and I'll be able to apply what I've learned to client's projects.

I am not a designer

insipid.com has been my home on the web for nearly a decade. It's hard for me to believe. When I was in college, one of my friends had an account on a Unix system with the username sapid. Just for fun, I took an account on that same system with the username insipid. Insipid is a great word, even if the meaning is boring, I find it to be an aesthetically pleasing word to look at and to say.

Eventually, I took my username and turned it into my personal strand of the world wide web. I'm a computer programmer and Oracle DBA by profession. I do a fair amount of work as a consultant for all sorts of companies and work on many different types of projects. I've thought many times of registering a new domain name and using it to make known my database programming services, but for whatever reason, I keep sticking everything into this site, insipid.com.

I am not a designer. When I first learned HTML, there just wasn't much to it. Most web pages were ugly, graphical web browsers weren't even available yet. Everything was text, lynx ruled the browser market. Then along came Mosaic. I remember sitting in the auditorium at work watching the demonstration of Mosaic, I think everyone in the room was blown away. The implications were obvious.

The web has never been the same and my skills have never caught up. I remember when Cascading Style Sheets came out, no one used them due to the fact that they were not supported by any existing browser. Well, the time has come for me to tackle CSS and figure out what the heck they are all about. Over the next few months, I'll be dedicating myself to learning CSS and implementing a CSS version of this site. I'll never be a designer, but with some hard work and some luck, this page may not be such an eye sore. Stay tuned.