Redesign

So Dooce 5.0 is up and running after weeks and late nights and naptimes spent designing and coding and yelling from the basement, “REFRESH YOUR BROWSER!” from the person making changes to the CSS to the person upstairs adding things to the content management system. That is what I need to say to you, you who have sent me email telling me that you can’t read the dark text on the dark red background. Refresh your browser, clear your cache. Some of the old site may be hanging on. You should see dark text on a white background. And some cowbells.

As for the cowbells: I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell! It’s a reference to a skit on “Saturday Night Live” with Will Ferrell starring Christopher Walken that made fun of the Blue Oyster Cult. It’s my favorite skit from SNL, one that Jon had told me about over and over before I actually saw it, and you know how sometimes when someone talks up something and they tell you how cool and funny it is and then when you actually see it it’s not as cool and funny as it was made out to be? Well, Jon talked up this skit and told me how cool and funny it was, and when I actually saw the skit, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be that cool and funny, but then there was the cowbell and then there was Will Ferrell’s flabby, hairy gut jiggling as he banged the shit out of the cowbell, and then there was Christopher Walken just standing there, emotionless, reading the lines off the cue card COMPLETELY UNAWARE of Will Ferrell’s flabby gut and the MAD FURIOUS OUT OF CONTROL CLANKING OF THE COWBELL. How could Christopher Walken just stand there and not laugh? Jimmy Fallon was laughing, he saw the flabby gut and the cowbell, but Robot Walken just stood there doing what he was told to do, asking for more cowbell. And I sat on the bed laughing and crying and hurting from lack of oxygen. There was just so much cowbell.

There are still some bugs to be worked out in this design, and we’ll get to them this week when we have more time between naps and after dinner. This design should work in most browsers, including the latest version of Internet Explorer on the PC. I cannot guarantee that this design will work on older browsers of IE, or for IE on the Mac. IE for the Mac is a dead browser, and so Jon did not design the code to work in that browser. That browser is evil and corrupts innocent souls that would otherwise make it into the Mormon Celestial Kingdom of Heaven. We recommend that you download Firefox or Safari for the Mac. I personally use Safari. It is warm and cute.

Thank God this is over. At least sort of. I know that there will be a few more nights when I turn to Jon and begin a terrible sentence with, “You know, I was thinking….” And it will end with a change to the site that will cause hours of figuring out code, and Jon will tear out yet another chunk of hair. Over the weekend there was a lot of this going on:

“Leta, your father is going to give me a heart attack!”

and

“Leta, your mother needs to CHILL OUT.”

This is how the Armstrongs spend holiday weekends. I won’t tell you about how we got this whole thing up and running while shuffling back and forth between family functions out in Copperton, Utah — a place so far west that we almost drove off the side of the earth — and the ticket one of us got for speeding, making an illegal lane change, failure to use the turn signal, and expired tags. And I didn’t even have one panic attack!