Redesign

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I decided 10 days ago to redesign this website. I figured it defintely needed a change, but more importantly I felt that I needed to abandon my crippling dependency on nested tables and embrace the beauty that is CSS.

Now people, if there ever was a person on this earth who loves nested tables, my God, that person is me. I can take any design, however curvy or transparent or unnecessarily purple and turn it into tables. I cannot possibly extol the virtues of nested tables enough: Car won’t start? Try nested tables. Having trouble in your relationship? Try nested tables. Constipated? I highly recommend nested tables.

So when I sat down and started fiddling with CSS I felt as if I was typing without my hands. And I tried to give up several times, believe me. There were entire hours I spent cussing at the monitor and scaring the shit out of my dog. But my lovely bearded husband, like a concerned family member staging an intervention, wouldn’t let me fall back into my old ways. He’s defintely a keeper.

I’ve also gone back through my pre-Movable Type entries and entered them into Movable Type, perhaps the most time consuming endeavor of the redesign. Every night for the past week I’ve had dreams where I can’t do anything without an opening <div> and a closing </div>. Conversations had to begin with <div id= “conversation”> and end with </div>. There were <div> structures for going up the stairs, feeding the dog, and hitting the snooze button on the alarm, which proved to be the most exhausting because I usually hit the snooze button about 7 times. So in between the 7 <div id= “alarm-snooze”></div> tags there were also 7 <div id= “go-back-to-sleep”></div> tags.

So this website is coded entirely in CSS and, for the most part, validates in XHTML. I say “for the most part” because there are still some tables and old code hanging around in some of the much older entires, and I don’t have the time right now to go under the hood of each of those entries. And I just know that some self-righteous geek out there is going to run my site through a validator, and when it comes back un-validated he’s going to come here and make some snarky comment. And I just know he’ll be from Wisconsin.

To make matters even more frustrating, I couldn’t have picked a worse week to undertake a redesign. In the last 8 days my husband has accepted a job offer, we’ve procured financing for a house, I’ve developed a screaming bladder infection, we’ve found a house to buy, and now we have to haggle with 40 different people over how much and who gets to buy the house. I just needed that little extra anxiety of entering over 600 blog entries into a content management system.

<div id= “relief”> Phew! </div>