something soothing

there’s something soothing about writing html on a rainy weekend.

yes, i spent most of saturday afternoon, listening to the rain fall outside while i ground away at a new site design for filsa.net. it’s pretty satisfying to have a mental image of what you want the site to be, and be able to express that design in a few lines of html and a few more lines of css code.

also, you have to love the no-compile instant development cycle for html. edit, save, reload the browser. wha-la! (flourish).

i managed to pick out some great non-commercial for-attribution Creative Common licensed photos on flickr for my banner images. i need to recut the images because i did them as pngs for some reason. but they are great images and add a lot of punch to the design.

but a design is not enough. i got pretty far with a design, but there’s so much more i want to do:

• i want to add interactive elements.
• i want a randomly rotating banner image.
• i want the banner area to be shrinkable.
• i want the home page to have content that toggles on and off.
• and so on.

and then i take a wander through some of my friend’s websites. it’s a truism that you maintain your website more when you are looking for work, or when you think people will come to look at your site. so my friend’s websites are in various stages of development:

brandon has always had the best, richest, deepest personal website of anyone i know. it’s impressive technically, has great content, and has a consistent design and user experience. it’s humbling, how well he knows how to put a site together.

florian has both a great eye for design and an ear for honest conversation. he puts both to good use on fangohr.com.

other friend’s sites are stagnant because they’ve been busy with work or other website projects.

i notice that one of my friends has taken down his personal site. he got a full time gig a few months back, so there’s no need to hang out the shingle, as it were. all his site says now is:

you have been cursed by gypsies!

looking at brandon’s site, i think i might need a heavy duty backend system to help me manage my content. i don’t mind coding a couple pages by hand, but more than 5 or 6, it’s time to use tools to help me out. so i’m evaluating a little content management system called mephisto. i’m pretty sure that it’ll frustrate me in some way–all the cm systems i’ve ever used have had limitations of one sort or another.

it feels good to be developing a website again.