Hey kids,
Just a quick update for anyone who might be interested.
But before all that, let us address the mask-wearing elephant in the room. Rhetorically speaking, everyone survived Captain Trips, I trust? I remember when I uploaded this … er, placeholder … in early March; it was a different time. I had plans to go places and do things, back then, and none of them involved wearing a face mask or social distancing or germ protocols à la Howard Hughes.
And being canceled, for that matter.
Back then, a mere five months ago, if I had worn a face mask into the grocery store it would warrant at best a few stares and giggles and at worst a visit with the cops. Now, masked soccer moms look down their nose at me as if I farted in church when I forget and don’t wear a face mask in public.
Never saw that one coming. But such is life in the time of cholera corona.
And yes, it is supposed to be love in the time of cholera, and apologies to Gabriel García Márquez.
Now on with the show.
First off, it’s Neil, not Neal, so apologies to him, too — not that he is likely to care — and his kith and kin (and it’s Peart, while we are at it). One would think that a pasty North American white guy who has met his relatives in Northern Ireland (who originally came there via Scotland and the English) would not need his spelling corrected on a name derived of Gaelic origins. Well póg mo thóin for all that.
Second, I have made some progress on my … “project” (that will do for now). No, really. One of my reasons for doing this was that WordPress had become too unwieldy over the last decade or so for what I had in mind, and I was looking for something a little less … well, less. Not that it’s not good for what it is and does, mind you; it is a great content management system (CMS). It’s just that it had become too much for me — like fishing for bluegills with an arctic whaler, as it were.
So after looking at things like Pico CMS and whatnot — no databases (hell yes!) for example, which was closer — but not quite — to what I had in mind, it dawned on me that I was reinventing the wheel. Back in the days of yore — 1998 to 2006 — and the halcyon days of the ‘net, I put up my own websites, having learned HTML and CSS myself. Then WordPress, Drupal and the like came along and I got lazy. Now it’s 2020 and the answer was staring me in the keyboard: keep it simple and do it yourself. Thus right now I am knocking the rust of my web skills — mainly updating myself on what’s changed; I want my project to actually look like it was made today, in 2020 (well 2021, anyway), and not 2004.
So what is this project, you ask? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. Still shooting for a spring 2021 start date though. And it’s … coalescing, if you will, in the back of my head. Plus, if you look just a bit further down you can catch a partial glimpse of the tentative (!) title. …
P.S. Props to the makers of BlueGriffon; it is a kick-ass HTML editor, and it is free, open source and WYSIWYG. Très bien!