Once upon a time, in a horridly ugly alternate universe, there lived a Scary Webpage. Although the images weren’t indexed by the Wayback Machine, thanks to a friend, I can show you it.
Click the image if you want to biggie-size it. Also? A different friend sent the image to me as-is and the artist’s signature is not legible. If you recognize the artwork, holla – I’d love to give credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately, this was not my first webpage.
This was. Well, sort-of. I’m not sure if this is Tig’s creation or mine and he’s not available to ask. (More than likely I coded a page and then he went back and “fixed” it.) I’m fairly sure that both of these pages were created in Dreamweaver.
On the blogging side of things, I can tell you that somewhere around April of 2004 I moved from Moveable Type (please dear gawd don’t ask me what version) to WordPress 1.0.2 and haven’t looked back once.
Between the generation of that first webpage (2002) and my conversion to WordPress (2004) I realized that I am Not A Coder. Ask me a question, I can find an answer for you. Ask me to code something for you and my brain will explode (and not in the shimmery pretty fireworks kinda way either).
Like much of the rest of my life, I’m sure coding would prove to be easy if I Would Just Apply Myself a Bit More but nah. I’d rather let Matt and The Developers handle that side of things. Why reinvent the wheel, after all?
This post is my response to Lorelle, kickin’ my bloggin’ ass.
A great tribute to how your life has been changed with WordPress, but how has software changed and evolved for you otherwise? Are you using more open source and freeware than when you started playing with the computer? What software did you use that you don’t, and why? What’s changed for you over time for the software you are dependent upon?
Oh gosh, the “other” software could make a post in and of itself. A lot of my evolution with software also came with self-awareness and self-acceptance. I would rather try to shove a marshmallow through a keyhole than to code, and I really truly needed to accept that about myself. Both of my husband-type people kept telling me it was easy and yet there I was at 230am crying big fat frustrated tears because I couldn’t take someone else’s (buggy) code and fix it. I had to completely step away from any and all projects I was doing and re-evaluate what I was comfortable with doing and why. I had to learn to say “Oh I don’t know how to do that” and let it go instead of googling for a solution and testing different ones til I found one that worked (sort-of).
To be completely frank, I want to slap some booboo cream and a bandaid on the bleeding edge of technology.
The Open Source world has evolved so much. When I was first dipping my toes if you posted a “stupid” question in the support forum, you got two technically correct but completely useless answers; twenty-five versions of “gawd yer steeeewpid”; and one answer to your question – in the form of a link to the thread with the answer and a link that would take you to the search function. These days it doesn’t take nearly that long for the answer link post to show up.
I have embraced open source in my web browsers (pimped FireFox on the laptop, Flock on the desktop at the moment), email client (Thunderbird), and liked the free version of Trillian enough to pay for the pro version. I use OpenOffice.org but then have to save in M$ format. I fell in love with the Foxit reader when I got annoyed with the Adobe reader splash page. Depending on the size of the upload, I may use FireFTP (plugin for firefox) or Filezilla. 7-zip is my unzipper of choice. I know there are more programs on that list that I need to give love to, but that will have to wait for another day.
The former in-laws ruined me in the image editing realm: they were pro photogs with a licensed copy of Photoshop. I tried The Gimp and Irfanview and truly tried to like them, but it wasn’t comfortable for me. And yes, I do realize it’s probably a “me” issue, not a software issue.
I got started with DreamWeaver to handle website coding. I don’t remember where I heard about it, but I now use phpDesigner 2007. (I rarely open it these days – and I’m OK with that LOL)
Over time my attitude has changed about software piracy, which led me to Open Source/Freeware. At one time, every piece of software on my computer was hacked or cracked. With the evolution of the open source community, I’ve made a concerted effort to replace those programs with what would turn out to be a vastly superior product anyway.
Excellent! I, too, have worn many bandages having played too much with the bleeding edges.
Great description. Poetry!