Once upon a time, in a Kingdom not so far away, I used to know what I was doing when it came to putting together a website. Over the past 12 years I’ve probably had at least 10 websites on various topics including Winnie the Pooh, Doug Gilmour, Thieves Crossing (an indy band no-one has heard of), RENT, and other such randomness. I started coding in raw HTML… sorta old school, and a pain to modify styles after the fact, but it worked. For a time I thought frames were hot, then not so much. Then I was all about itty bitty sites squished into i-frames… what was I thinking? And then came CSS. This is where my life as web savvy began to wane. I can still read code… just enough to know where the ugly things I do are messing up, but not enough to actually do anything about it.

Today I scored a major victory for web dummies such as myself. I acutally FOUND a photo gallery plug-in that WORKS with the theme (pretty layout) that I picked for this site. I had tried a few over the last days & they didn’t quite fit… the pictures and text were sitting outside of the nice off white text area… dOH! Now… they’re where they are supposed to be… waHOO!!!

Do I seem disproportionately happy? Trust me… this was one of the main reasons that I abandonned my last Content Management System (CMS). In Drupal there were a lot of great scripts and the CMS could do anything so long as you were at least part rocket scientist, but the downfall was the documentation… it was created by people who know what they’re talking about, but cannot concieve of the idea that perhaps a basic user might not get it… sorta like working from an Italian woman’s personal cookbook… the secret ingredient is always missing & its the one that works the magic.

Anyhoo, I’m happy… 3ish days & I’m not pulling my hair out… this may be a first.