Liza Constable

It was a weak and lonely moment, sick in bed with my mac laptop, when I signed up for a myspace.com music page. Don’t do it! What a stupid looking mess! And to top it off, only one friend… But I swear I had seen some nice pages, and people I knew, like my friend Scott Nygaard and Lissa and…it had looked kinda cool. I scoured the web for ways to make it look more creative while the voice inside said: loser! One friend. Some awful stuff out there, glittering, pink dancing cats and puppies, things like that. Pimpmyspace.com: absolutely the dregs. I was ready to quit when I came across Mike Davidson @ mikeindustries.com, who was also embarrassed by the design of the myspace.com home page. He didn’t whine. He gave away some code to make it nice, it didn’t break rules, it was tasteful. Great stuff. I used it. Nice. But the point is, it set me on a mission. Web Standards! Clean code! Don’t clog the system! Faster pages!

Um, but don’t look for my myspace page, I haven’t looked at it or touch it since. On the other hand, I wonder how many friends I have now. What if I still only have one?? (or 1 Billion, thanks to Mike and his clever code humor)

I used to look at code from time to time, like lifting the hood to look at that new fangled engine. Purtty. Seemed like the thing to do. It worked ok. And that’s all I needed. But I really, I just don’t know how to make all that code work for me. No matter how long I stare at it. But I am this far, and I have learned a huge amount. A month will only learn you a handful of jargon, which is part of the process. My first and last site was totally faked. Still that’s a hell of a lot more than my sister can do, for instance.

Here’s how it all got started: Kim, my former neighbor, local school music teacher (of my kids) and part of the band The Short Sisters, asked if I could make her a web site. I said yes (?), and hightailed to the bookstore and library to see if it was possible to do it right. After a month or more of having my head buried in web related things, I’ve decided to move MY site to a blog formatted site. I like how human it feels. And the code is right, not shoved into place.

My new site uses Wordpress, with the theme “Cutline”, hosted by Dreamhost. Dreamhost has a nifty one-click install for Wordpress. I’m not ready to make my own design, since I’ve been feeling more than a little dizzy looking at all that code, patiently waiting for it to all make sense. Besides, those code dudes? I can’t compete. The depth of their understanding is more than I have time to figure out. I should have started when I was a baby.

Which is why I’m a musician.

Thanks to Kim for getting me here.