HTMLovin'

My first attempt to learn HTML came about four years ago, when I decided I was born to blog (ha!). Being a hands-on type with no real sense of my own limitations, I not only decided to blog, I decided to get my own domain name, set up hosting, code my own front page, and do my own Wordpress installation; a week and a LOT of googling later (with a little help from Laughing Squid tech support) I had accomplished my goal. I then proceeded to update on a geometrically decreasing curve, crashing and burning entirely about a year later. Oh well (see Blog Fail).

I wrote that first page using only online resources, including w3schools, Dave Raggett's "Getting Started with HTML, and HTML.net. These three were my staples, but I'm not proud - I'll use any resource I can find, and I'm pretty sure I don't write anything that could be termed well-formed code. If you were to navigate to that primitive page (which I am not linking, you'll notice), you might find it to be eerily similar to the current state of my SIRLS site. I love that backhoe.

A couple of years after the blog experiment, my partner and I wrote a book, and suddenly we needed a website. Cactus Camping was born, in a flurry of ill-considered frames. I wish I could take credit for its current appearance, but my co-author got tired of waiting for me to fix it and took a web design class through ASU. My only consolation is that it's still under construction, too, and my frame-riddled version worked reliably under IE (so there).