conquering the inter-web

So... entrepreneurship has turned me into a big ol' computer geek.

It started innocently enough: I wanted to brush up on the tiny bit of HTML I learned about back in ninth grade. My dear, professionally nerdy friend offered to set up a business website for me, but even with the framework all outsourced, I'd still need to be able to update product pages on my own. I started working on an outline for it using OpenOffice.org's HTML editor, which is a very basic substitute for programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver (and, people, can I please just get a "Hell yeah!" for open-source?); but I found the WYSIWHG process somewhat frustrating, and according to Matt it codes "like garbage" anyway - when we met for lunch to look it over, he spent the better part of the hour just correcting the syntax. (Despite the web writer's shortcomings, I still dig the OOo suite, though. Get it. Love it.) Between my control-freakishness/perfectionism and the fact that I felt a bit bad for getting my friend to do for free (well, barter, actually - but I felt I was getting by far the more valuable end of the stick) what other people pay him quite handsomely to do... after that fateful lunch meeting I had to pass by the library anyway, so I stopped in and picked up a couple of HTML/XHTML/CSS reference tomes. And proceeded to spend the next seven hours glued to the sofa, giving myself a crash course in web languages and style sheets.

I kind of love it.

You know what I don't kind of love? Internet Explorer. Fuck that shit. Seriously. Now, I'm not saying that my code was perfect, because it certainly wasn't (come on, though - I'd been doing it for a day, so I'm hardly going to flog myself over that), but every other browser displayed it correctly. And the big problem is that I own a Mac (no, I don't consider that a problem in itself), for which IE is no longer available. So I was so pleased with myself, taking my brain-baby over to Matt's for him to look at, and then saw for the first time how IE completely mangled it. I nearly cried.

(And Matt, if you're reading this: yes, I understand your stance on IE; I still think it's an asshole.)

I have been messing around with the site for weeks since then. I completely redesigned the layout, taking into consideration some of Matt's suggestions; made an index, an "About" page, product galleries... and I did this all using TextEdit. Just code. Feel free to worship me. (I like my grapes unpeeled, thank you.) I have style-sheets. I have inline frames. There's even some JavaScript in there. I tap-tap-tapped away at it on Christmas Day. I was a woman on a mission.

I can't even tell you what my original deadline was, I've pushed it so many times. I do know that I had high hopes for launching on December 26th. That didn't happen. Then I was going to send it out into the world on New Year's Day. Nope. And every day since then. Failed.

And then... oh, and then...

It was ready. All the links linked. Finally. I borrowed Matt's computer, looked at it in Internet Explorer...

Fuck.

Viciously mangled! NOOOOOOOOOOO! And there was no clear reason why!

I spent most of a day trying to figure out how to get IE on my Mac, and waded into the strange world of emulators and alternative OS's: WINE, QEMU, Linux, ies4mac... turns out if I had an Intel processor, my life would be much, much easier. I still don't have a solution, but I know a lot more about a lot of computer-y things now. I ended up going to the library to check it on the public PCs, and then consulting Matt's laptop again. Not a fantastic long-term plan, so I'll continue my quest to obtain this stupid browser.

I am reasonably confident that every page of my site now functions more-or-less as it should on all browsers. Please take a look!