Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

The undocumented life is not worth living?

I was talking to my brother (known in the family as "The Boy") over the weekend. He just got a new computer and was installing Dreamweaver to design a web page for his band. He wanted my advice.

My brother is a real artist (although his degree is in fine arts, not graphics) and is from the generation that learned to key things into computers along with writing, but he's never done a web page. I'm not a programmer or an artist, but I started playing with HTML around 1995 or '96. I had a web designer friend who was teaching a lot of us how to code so he could hire us. Although it seemed briefly appealing, I never gave up my day job, but I have cluttered servers with several pages of my pictures and writing as I indulged this compulsion to keep adding web pages to the world.

Back during the summer I started this Rat in a Box project. Like earlier pages I've done, I just typed code into Notepad. That's tedious, so I started looking for an editor and was distracted by content management software...Movable Type, specifically. Then I decided I needed to learn cascading style sheets. My test blog (this one) took over my spare time and RIAB has languished.

Recently I've been flirting with City Desk as a way to get content up quickly, with a WYSIWYG editor, and a less-bloggy look. I'm a bit frustrated by the combination of templates and style sheets there, though, and I can't make my page look like I want it to. Now The Boy is tempting me with Dreamweaver...why learn CSS if I can just buy a program that will do the coding for me?

On the other end of the technological spectrum, my sister has started keeping a family scrapbook. ("Scrapbooking" is actually a verb, and now I know what those four aisles of decorative paper and funky scissors in the craft store are for.) The scrapbooks are bit more than mere photo albums, and I'm being seduced by them, too.

It's gotten me thinking...my brother has a band to promote, hence the web page. My sister has kids, hence the scrapbook. I have...no good reason to be documenting my life, really. The rat thing's a bit shaky...a rat owner can find a wealth of information already on the Internet without my page. The blog thing's a bit shaky...my recipes, I think, are my only meaningful content. As for a scrapbook...what would I put in, pictures of me sitting at the computer?

In other words, I'm documenting the heck out of my life, and I have no real life worth documenting. Perhaps there is a New Year's resolution in there somewhere...

Posted by Nic at January 1, 2004 10:37 AM | TrackBack