MindSpinner

It’s a fine thing to have the opportunity to do something challenging and completely different. It’s a sort of safari, an Everest expedition without the unthinkable cold. (Climbing Everest wouldn’t be my choice of challenges. I eschew unthinkable cold.)

The challenge that came to me this summer, courtesy of a friend and former client, was to dive into Web design after a five-year hiatus and to set up a blog. Simple stuff, if you know what you are doing. But I would have to learn and re-learn. This was good, the stuff of safaris, a crash course in everything I’d been falling behind in for half a decade.

To date, only the blog is nearing completion. The accompanying Web site still lies before us. After installing WordPress, we didn’t love any of the visual themes posted at WordPress.org; we liked instead a WordPress theme developed by a smart, friendly fellow in the UK, at www. phrixus.co.uk, who knows lots about blogs, photography, sailing, creating the illusion that he can build a shed in thirty seconds, and no telling what else. Graciously, he shared his design work - thank you, Shane! - and the theme implemented beautifully, except for one word in a sidebar, which displayed in the wrong style. I dug through the index page and the css style sheet all day before I found a way to fix the problem last night, and I made a dozen or so other small changes besides. I can read basic html, but I’m only getting to know php and css (with no intention of handcoding either ever), so what would have been somebody else’s quick fix was my safari into unknown lands. It wasn’t knowledge or intelligence that led to the solution, frankly; I credit sheer tenacity instead. I’m a real fan of sheer tenacity.

I went to bed last night with a sense of accomplishment; I was even prouder of this new success than I was three weeks ago when I fixed the upstairs toilet, which had been running for weeks while I told myself I really didn’t have time to deal with figuring out the problem and the fix. The lesson there was different: take a few minutes and just do it!