Learning HTML 2

I’m not a very visual person.  It’s even hard for me to shave because I don’t like looking at myself in the mirror any longer than I have to.  There’s this old guy with some sort of skin problem who looks back and then I had some odd condition called Cushing’s syndrome that altered the shape of the left side of my face a a few years ago.  Neither is like Elephant Man major, yet it’s enough for me to swear that the guy in the mirror isn’t me.  While I am the kind of blogger who obsessively checks his hit counts, I’ve not,in my seven months of Chancelucky life, ever spent nearly enough time making the site visually or user friendly.  Thankfully, my friend Mr. Pogblog even before we transformed to pixellated font-based life forms has always been one of the great encouragers of my writing, was kind enough to mention early on that I needed to learn to bold text to break up the page and to get me to learn to use span commands to excerpt the first couple paragraphs and thus not overwhelm the page.  Pogblog remains the most regular commenter here and it does wonders for me to know that someone is actually reading here than just doing URL driveby thing. In the meantime, I struggle to stay within shouting distance of her masterful command of the language and savagely inventive imagery.  Someone should think about publishing her conventionally so more people can have the benefit of her cultural window cleaning wizardry.  

Most recently, Alan Howard was kind enough to help me with del.ici.ious which appears in the right alley here.  Like this site, Life Through My Eyes  site includes content about widely divergent topics from comments about American avian flu policy to job interviews to an apparent fetish for Asian women (something that makes me a bit nervous.  I’ve wondered if he continues to visit my site out of hopes that I have a sister or neice he might fancy btw his friend Deidre sounds quite wonderful, at least based on his site). In any case, while one of the rules of sitetrapy building seems to be to have a nice “branded” identity,  I find I like blogging away on a variety of seemingly unrelated topics. I get a fair number of readers who are only interested in single areas of my site.  The tags on the right make it possible to click on a category and go straight to the entries that might be of interest.  


I’ve even taken to adding an occasional picture to the site to make it less text heavy, but I draw the line at posting pictures of younger single female relatives even though that would probably dramatically up this site’s hit count.  Of course, the fascinating thing to me is that Alan lives in New Zealand and we’ve never had contact that didn’t involve the exchange of a url of some kind.  Similarly, the blog has led me to Stamen (formerly Nicodemus)  another individual who lives on the other side of the world and whom I would never have encountered otherwise.  Stamen speaks a variety of languages active and archaic and revels in the spirit realm where science doesn’t quite meet perception and experience.  He may also have the distinction of being the world’s oldest blogger at age 85 (conventional years) and often I’m convinced he’s wiser than his years might suggest.

Equally fascinating, I appear to have regular readers who never comment here and I have no idea how they found this site.  It’s really quite flattering and fascinating to think that some unseeable individual is looking in my mirror. In any case,  I’m realizing that one of the differences between traditional paper-based publication and the stream of blogiousness is how subtly social blogmaking turns out to be.  This site would have looked and sounded far different, in fact it might have dried up on its own accord, had it not been for the variety of folk who quietly shape this place in certain ways.  Certainly if this site is becoming a bit more visually friendly, it has little to do with me and much to do with what remains an internet community that’s rather miraculously helpful and supportive in ways seen and unseen.  

I imagine that some day there will be a Carnot who ferrets out the thermodynamics of the Internet.  I’m sure that his/her/its laws will  include the tendency of all blogs to degenerate into spam, all discussion boards to ignite into flame wars, and for pop up ads to grow faster than the software that deals with it.  In the meantime, I marvel at the ways the net still enhances humane contact between individuals who might never have had the joy of meeting and sharing a few words and a little kindness.