Tuesday night’s weather was atrocious – with cold, wet, biting winds that cut right through the house. Thus, it wasn’t a good night for a ride. I even considered setting up the trainer to get a few miles into me, but I couldn’t stand the thought of 3 solid months of riding a bike in the basement. So, I put that off.
Instead, I worked on a friend’s website design.
Developing websites has been an interest to me for quite a few years – probably around 1995/96 when I first started to work with presenting information via a web browser instead of the traditional formats (Microsoft Office products, emails, physical handouts, etc). At a former employer, I setup a small, internal website that I used to display schedules and the various results of the engineering reports that my group was generating in support of the sales force at the company. It was very effective and set me down the path of always wanting to have the latest information on display – versus relying on a specific version of a file that was housed in a directory or passed along via email.
In my ignorance, I was using the various WYSIWYG editors out there and trying my best to offer simple, in-house navigation systems for supporting data. This meant I was never too close to the actual code of a site, but was at the mercy of the editors to provide the controls and the functions that I needed. But, around five years ago, I realized that I was missing out on a lot of functionality by developing inside Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. I went “old school” and left the rich editor environment and chose to write direct code inside a simple text editor.
Now my web sites are developed the old fashioned way – with a simple text editor. For the Windows OS, I will use Notepad++. For the Mac environment, I have started to use TextWrangler. Both are simple editors, but provide a code-based coloring system to the text for easy navigation. Whatever the operating system, dual monitors are a must – as I need to both see the active code and observe how it renders in the various browser choice (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc).
Typing away at my office computer doesn’t do much for keeping me slender, but it is a welcome way to exercise my braincells on a cold, dark winter’s night.
