As previously mentioned in this drivel, I’ve kept myself busy all freaking week doinking around with the html markup for each year’s drivel pages, and I think I may finally be done. There’s a certain amount of unsuredness because there are just so many pages to format, but everything looks right even though I’m still a little cross-eyed from it, but oh so very satisfied with the result. I even pre-formatted the page layout for next year and, pardon me, but I can’t help babbling about it for what I hope will be only a little while.

Defining the terms: “doinking around” doesn’t really have a definition I can articulate. It’s tweaking, fiddling, cogitating over, fine-tuning, changing one way and then another, squinting at, toying with, furrowing my brow because of, having a splendid time with, and so on. It’s as much an attitude and as activity.

“Html markup” is a great big bunch o’ invisible tags I add to the text of this message to give it that very special drivel-like appearance in your browser. It’s not a computer language, say the computer geeks, and insist that we who are not one with the body call it “markup,” but I don’t completely understand why. What I understand is it’s fun to play with, and I can do it all day. I wish I could find a job where they would let me do this. I would agree to do all the scut work. Do you hear me, O great and wise web development companies? All I ask is that I don’t have to change out of my pajamas.

“Markup for next year” means just what you think it means. You’re probably already too keenly aware that I’ve been more or less constantly changing the way the drivel pages look over the years, sometimes just a tiny bit, too subtle to remark on, sometimes quite a whole lot. Even after I switched over to WordPress I couldn’t resist tweaking the markup every couple days or so. That’s WordPress. When I archive the entries I mark them up on a flat text page and each year gets its own style. Just because I can.

It makes me cross-eyed because I have to squint at a computer screen for hours at a time, usually while I’m drinking a pot of coffee. That’s not a typo. I don’t know why I even bother to pour it into a cup. I suppose because the pot would get cold a lot faster. No, that can’t be it. I make the coffee in a caraf that keeps it piping hot all day. Besides, I like cold coffee. Not all the time, just when I need a hard slap in the face. Wait, where was I?

Oh, one more term to define: “pre-formatting” means I formatted it before it was formatted. It’s one of those nonsense words people make up all the time by sticking “pre-” in front of a word, like pre-heating an oven. What’s that mean? Heating it up before you heat it up? Why would you even say such a thing? In my case, I did it so I could rant a little. Sorry.

The process of coming up with a new look for each year’s page takes a long time because I’m a very seat-of-the-pants guy. A Professional would come up with a plan, sketch it on several big sheets of bristol board using their years of experience in graphic art design, and spend many more hours thinking through the markup language that would give them the desired results before they would ever begin the long process of writing the text and marking it up with html code.

As you can no doubt tell from the pages you’re looking at right now, that’s not me. I don’t do graphics. Graphics mostly piss me off. They’re real pretty, but the more graphics there are on a page, the longer it takes the page to load. Also, pages that have been tricked out with a lot of graphics tend to have lots of other bells and whistles, too, because once you get started with the tinsel and sound effects, it’s hard to stop. Why not give it that little extra something special?

Here’s why: My attention span is so short that I’m nodding off if a web page takes more than ten seconds to appear. If it takes more than thirty seconds, I hit the BACK button and never return. And I think I’m a pretty patient guy. So my goal is to make sure the pages of my drivel load so quickly that the two or three loyal readers I have won’t even notice they’re loading. It should happen in the blink of an eye, even if you don’t have the bandwidth of a major global defense network.

After coming up with a page layout, I have to add the code to each page. I rather like this part, because it’s fun to watch a page of flat text jump to life, the margins snapping into place, the bolds and the italics dressing the lines, the headers announcing each new date and subject. I like to see how all that futzing around changed each page in such a fundamental way. I like being a great big nerd about it, is what I like.

“What changes,” I hear you say, “I don’t see any changes!” Well, of course you don’t, not here. I copy all this drivel into an emergency back-up blog that I’ve been promising myself I’d clean up one of these years. You never see it unless you go rooting around in all the rest of the drivel.