Today I found out that a non-profit organization, my very first web design client, apparently grew tired of my saying I’d redesign their site “one day”. It was a hideous old site, and it needed to be updated, but I didn’t have to time to get around to it, especially since it would be a pro bono job. Today they were telling me about this other guy they found who was interested in doing it, and how he was going to set them up so they could update everything through FrontPage.

<Heart Stops>

<Deep Breath>

Not good news. Here I was planning to knock them onto the web scene with a fresh new look and standards compliance, and I lost out because of my own stupid procrastination. Bad Scottie. No cookie!

I might offer to work with this new guy as a team. I didn’t want to do the whole project by myself, anyway. Life is always a lesson, I guess.

I redesigned my header file a little bit, to give it a more compact feel. Having the top 10% of the screen filled with…basically nothing…didn’t seem like a sharp design. So I made a new header. Now it feels like something’s missing. Maybe the logo’s too small now. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

That’s the beauty of the Web, I can tweak this thing eternally, and you guys see whatever little changes I make, experiencing the pain with me. No final proofs or print runs, no “Second Printing”s, no “Check out our next issue for a new design!” Just endless iterations, each one instantly zapped around the globe.

I don’t know what I’d do without this technology. If I was born a hundred years ago I’d probably be working in a horse stall.

From Leo LaPorte: The that could allow any webpage to delete all the files in any directory on your hard drive. Yikes. Better check this one out if you’re on XP.

Well, not really, but still. It seems like it. In the past month, Simon Willison has managed to:

1. Build (from scratch) an archive for the CSS Discuss mailing list
2. Build (from scratch) a Wiki for the CSS Discuss mailing list, and
3. Rebuild his home-grown weblog from the ground up

It takes me a month just to wash my socks. He also posts three or four times a day something new about XML, or PHP, or Python. This boy’s running circles around me.