Monday, May 05, 2008

Teeth Gnashing

I bought one of those dental mouth guard things to keep me from grinding my teeth at night and waking up with an incredibly stiff jaw. It works well enough. But since I've made an effort to save my teeth by night I might as well do something to stop grinding them together by day out of worry and frustration.

Enter today's solution: the website.

I spent the afternoon in a chilly basement unaware of the time because there is no freakin daylight down there building a template for my own personal website. Ya!

I like it. It's pretty. And -- better yet -- I think I've built it in a way that will be functionable! I have Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator so I was able to make the template and slice it with an eye to graphics. Illustrator also allows you to save the sliced image in a html document with a table in it. From there I had to go through notepad and repreive my HTML skills of yore (read: high school) and it didn't turn out half bad. I would have liked to have used an editor for the HTML but Mircosoft tanked their editor that used to come with Windows. It was called FrontPage and I don't miss it. It was an editor that tried to be smarter than you and in the process made your site ugly unless you knew HTML to fix its flourishes. But without FrontPage I no longer have an editor program period. I'm certain I could find one to download for free somewhere (any suggestions?) but for the time being I am doing alright keeping the form simple and tweaking the script by hand when needed.

This has been good because it has kept me occupied, productive and optimistic all day. I feel like I accomplished something, I didn't gnash my teeth with worry. In fact, worry was the farthest thing from my mind as this was a tangible indulgence in my Successful Author Fantasy. (A fantasy which now has its own website, I might add.)

The SAF website is not online and running, so no link as yet. Today I worked the art template and the HTML but there's no written content and no official domain name. Those are the next steps.

Highly Recommended