-----------------------------

Random Quote of the Day:
"You're not Gollum, you're Frodo."
"Why?"
"Because I'm Sam."
- Kreeno and Mikoto

-----------------------------

Y'know, this is getting scary. I have two blog-things, and I update both of them fairly regularly (when I update at all). I have this one here, where I put my less opimistic stuff and random bits of writing, and then I've got another one at Xanga, where I sound like some hyper little kid all the time...

Speaking of randomness. I just took the "longevity test" (don't ask, it was for school), and it said I'm expected to live to 86. Woohoo! ^_^

...Yeah. On that rather strange note, I'm gonna move on to the fun part...

-----------------------------
As It Is, part IV
The Joys of Webmastering

Tap tap. Tap. Tap-tap-taptap-tap taptaptap tap. Tap tap. Tap. Click.
Silence.
"Damn!" A sigh of frustration; a curtain of hair falling around a grimacing face. Another murmured curse. Long fingers danced over the keyboard again, this time to a more productive end. The boy's face lit up in a wide smile. "Got ya, ya bugger," he murmured.
"Got what?" someone asked.
"Huh? Oh, I've been trying to get this color scheme to work," he said, not sparing a glance to see who was talking to him. He didn't have to. It was her. His voice was as calm and controlled as he could make it, but he couldn't master the flush rising up his cheeks, so he kept his face turned squarely to the screen in front of him.
He heard a chair scraping back, and then she was there, leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. "Hmmm... Have you tried making that background a shade darker? With, I don't know, maybe a pale yellow text? That'll make it easier on the eyes, and it'll fit your graphics better."
The boy shook his head. "I've tried that. I can't find the right name. It always gives me these weird oranges."
"Here, let me try." He stood and gave her the chair, watching with more than a little curiousity as she typed in the school homepage.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a really nice color chart I know of, that I think will really help," she said, not looking up. "Let's see...ah, here it is. You click on the colors you want, like this, and it'll bring them up off to the side and overlay them for you. That way you can see what it looks like before you go change all your code."
The boy gave an appreciative nod as she clicked a handful of blues and yellows. "The second and third ones go well," he said, leaning in for a better look.
The girl's shoulders tensed, and he straightened quickly. His cheeks turned another shade of red.
"Er, yeah... Where's your source code?"
"It's on Geocities," he stammered. "First window on the left..." She pulled it up and replaced some of his text with seemingly random series of letters and digits. He let out an appreciative whistle when she refreshed his page. "Wow...that's a huge improvement already."
She nodded. "Yeah. Now all you have to do is replace the light blue and gold tags with the colors on this one, and you should be good."
He winced. "Guess I should get started then. I've got about ten pages, and they're all tables and stuff..."
"Ouch."
"Yeah."
She tapped her finger on the mouse thoughtfully, skimming over the page. "Have you ever tried CSS?"
"What's that?"
"Cascading Style Sheets. It's basically a slightly fancier version of HTML. It's kinda weird at first, but once you figure it out it's great. I use it all the time. You can set it up so that you only have to change one page to change your entire site, and if you have a part that you want to be different you can change just that part too. Here, let me show you." She opened up the Geocities window again and selected Create New, typing in "style.css" as the filename.
"Okay, here's how it works. You've got a body tag, just like in HTML, except that you use the curly brackets instead of the arrow things. You can put in background color, scrollbar properties, font face and size, all sorts of stuff... And then down here you can play with your links. You know, get rid of the underline, change all the colors, give it a background when you roll the mouse over it, all that fun junk that the better sites have. And if you want a special look for, say, your tables, you can add that in up here, above the body tag." There was a minute or two of furious typing, and then she clicked Save. "And all you have to do to put it into your pages is link to it, like this..." She put in a short string of code that the light-haired boy didn't follow.
"That's awesome," he said, looking at the page. The colors were all off - for sake of demonstration she'd used colors like "rose" and "fireorange," and the overall effect was extremely tacky - but even so he could see how much faster the page had loaded and how many fewer errors there were.
"Isn't it, though?" she said, sounding rather proud of herself. "I'll e-mail you some good links tonight, so you can go learn how to do it. For now just go ahead and play around with what I already wrote; copy and paste the link into the other pages and get rid of the extra tags, and you should be home free. What's this for, anyway?"
"Oh, it's just something a friend asked me to work on," he replied. "Eventually it's going to be his fanart archive. But he's even more clueless about HTML than I am, so he asked me to make the page for him."
The girl opened her mouth to say something, but the bell cut her short. She glanced at her watch. "Crap! I've got to go - my class is on the other end of the building, and I'm usually there by now!" She snagged her bag and nearly ran for the exit.
"Hey, thanks," he called to her retreating back. "You really helped me a lot."
"Anytime," she said over her shoulder, giving him a small half-wave as she blew through the door.
Making a conscious effort to wipe the stupid grin off his face, he logged off first Geocities and then the computer, and made a beeline towards his first period class.

-----------------------------

E-mail me!