Wait, don't go away!

Don't worry; you're in the right spot. Let Me Get This Straight has just had a little work done.

I've had this blog for over a year now, and it was time for a nip/tuck. I grew tired of the old Blogger template with the orange star in the corner that looked like it belonged on an athletic shoe and the giant 897 watermark that wasn't code for anything. Typographically, there were things about the template I liked and it served me well enough, but it was beginning to feel worn. Since I couldn't find a template that expressed my individuality, or one that I even liked, I decided to make my own.

Also, I think if one is being paid to be a "Multimedia Specialist," one really has no room to complain about a cookie-cutter template, and she should perhaps take some initiative already.

So, I set about learning how to write my own blog template. Surprisingly, I found it a little more difficult than writing regular webpages or even entire sites. This is partly because I only ever taught myself HTML, CSS, and Javascript from scratch; I never had a class and only briefly referred to books. Mostly, I prefer to dissect things that already work—break a web page apart and change things one by one, observing reactions until I make it all crash. (Reason #53 why I would make a terrible doctor.) (But I'd have my own television show.)

When I was eight years old, my mother bought me a maze-like computer adventure game for our state-of-the-art, DOS-based, green-screen Compaq. I defeated the game but didn't lose interest in it, and I discovered that you could construct your own game with your own mazes and your own adventures. My mother still laughs over the time she walked into the computer room one day to find eight-year-old-me sitting in front of the computer with the manual in my lap, looking first at the book, then at the DOS prompt on the screen, then at the book again, amusing myself by determining the best way to amuse myself.

It was eight-year-old-me that kept swimming to the surface as I sat in front of my computer at 4:00 this morning, having been up all night deconstructing Blogger's own coding language. In the end, it's not really that hard at all, but I say that with the ease of a person who has learned it. It was trial and error all night long, and I finally went to bed with it 90% solved. The other 10% came in an epiphany as I woke up two hours later to go to work. I'm a little sleepy today, but I blame it on eight-year-old-me never wanting to go to bed either.

I'm still un-kinking a few things, so if you are running into formatting problems, please let me know. Also, if my blog implodes, I apologize, and I'll get on that.