Coding Hell

Let's get one little detail clear:I am not a web developer by any stretch of the imagination. I am a guitarist, a recording engineer, a certified electronics tech and a fair shade-tree mechanic, as long as there is no fuel injection involved. But I have, by virtue of being a handy kind of a guy, been the webmaster for my partner's website www.jennykerr.com and my own, as well as a few others for friends. But to call myself a real web developer would be more than a stretch. It would be preposterous. Kind of like calling Alanis Morissette an actual guitarist. Or G-Dubya a great orator.

No, real web-dev (a little lingo, there) requires an arcane skill known as "coding" if you want to really make some web magic happen. The people I know who do this are a whole other race of smart guys and gals who have my respect. What I've been doing is the web equivalent of Karaoke. I just take a pre-fab page and add my own crap onto it. To achieve this dubious result I have been using MS Frontpage which is sort of the Hamburger Helper of web developement tools. They say that if you bang your head against the wall long enough, you gotta get something right and I have my share of lumps to verify this. I have, over the years, seen that all the fancy-schmancy stuff is not nearly as important as getting the basics right like not making it too cluttered and making it easy for people to see what you're trying to communicate.

Sort of like making music.

Having said that, I have just learned a new trick all by myself (look, Ma...I'm in the deep end!) that required me to learn some (extremely) rudimenatary XML coding. The result is a simple but cool and extremely useful MP3 player that lives on Jenny's website and plays a handful of songs without the usual rigamarole of downloading, saving, different media players, blah, blah...

Now, I am fully aware the most of the code slingers I know could have banged out this little nugget like "dropping a deuce" in the morning, but then where's the satisfaction in that? It's only when you get under the hood and bust a few knuckles that you get a real apppreciation for these things.

So, keep practicing, Alanis. And George? Well, never mind.