Week 2: Build a site.

But what kind of site to build? During week 1, the textbook delivered the shocking revelation that, since an HTML document is basically just a normal document with angle brackets, Notepad is a perfectly functional basic HTML editor. Following some examples from the book, I built my first webpage from scratch using Notepad. I incorporated all the basic tags from Chapter 2, and got them all working. There was nothing radically new to me here except for the !DOCTYPE bit -- I already knew how to use [a] and [img], and the rest of the tags were all less complicated than those -- but I'd never put them all together into a webpage without the help of a crappy Web interface like those of Geocities or Google Sites. There's still a lot to learn, but I'm feeling the exhilaration of seeing the first dividends of a new skill!

So I can build (very simple) webpages. But what will I put on them? I tutor students to pay the bills, but for the moment I don't want a Web presence for my business; that would make me look altogether too professional. I would rather create a site about a personal interest. The obvious choice, and the one I'll probably go with, is poetry. I play with verse here and there, and have written some stuff I want to put up on the Internet. The normal venue for publishing hobbyist creativity on the Web seems to be DeviantArt, but DA doesn't give you a lot of control over the presentation of your work. A self-built site, in theory, gives you as much control as you like.

A website about my poetry, of course, needs at least one page containing a poem, and I have some half-formed thoughts about that topic. Neil Gaiman's website has a feature that grabs a few random essays from some behind-the-scenes database whenever you refresh the page, and I like this serendipitous way of delivering creative content, even though it takes control away from both me and the user. It creates the sensation of hidden depths, as well as the aesthetic feeling of the evanescence of what you're looking at, both of which are entirely appropriate ways for poetry readers to engage with a poem. If I can figure out how to create this effect with databases and/or scripts, I'd like to try and replicate it with poems. Elsewhere on the site, I want a blog -- possibly as the main page, possibly not -- as a way to talk to whatever audience the site ends up drawing. I should put up a resume, too. As I keep learning about the tricks of the Web publishing trade, I'll keep an alert eye for which ones fall in line with this vision for my site!