The Real Rapunzel

By Cynthia Morgan
Copyright 2006 on this one. All rights reserved.

Mama traded me for a handful of greens.

Daddy fixed her a salad, and Auntie Rue took me away. Auntie Rue said she took me because of the greens. A lady who put greens ahead of her baby, she sniffed, didn’t deserve one.

But really, it was my long red hair. It grew faster than kudzu; the day after my birth it reached from my cradle five feet to the floor.

And Auntie saw a goldmine.

[Read more]

Webistry evolving

The thing about the Web is it evolves. Every time I hear a colleague say, “well, I’m still trying to finish the (content, design, IA, whatever) so I can launch it,” I pull out soapbox #143: “If you wait until it’s finished…well, you’ll be waiting a long, long time. Just get something out there. Make it perfect later.”

So, naturally, when I saw my website was getting long in the tooth about three years ago, I did exactly what I’ve told everyone else not to do: I let it get stale while I waited until I could really get in there and rebuild.

Do that, and your site will slowly die. I now know this from sad personal experience. The gratifying part is, of course, that people NOTICED it was dying and complained about it.

So, thank heavens I got on the ball, stopped waiting until I could really get in there and redo the IA, and updated the bloody thing. (Of course, now I’m redoing it again as it settles in and I see what needs to be fixed…). Now that I’m back in the groove, I’m trying to grab old blog posts, stuff from the old site, etc., and get it all updated and back online. Hopefully that happens over the next week or so, but I will never again wait until I have time to do everything before I launch.

But while I was doing it, I grunnied around in my old archive files and noticed something: Until the current webbist’s block, I’d essentially redesigned my website every 9 months or so. And like the geeky yearbook pictures of our parents, I can’t believe some of the truly wacked out site designs I’ve had through the years. Here are some samples:

1998

This was the first Morganica.com. Didn’t last long–there were LOTS of things to keep up with all these little bits and pieces–but it tells me a lot of things about where I was, design-wise, in 1998.

For one thing, I was working at BYTE, arguing daily with a temperamental art director who’d just converted to the Zen school of design, i.e., if it’s not a pure white page, it’s junk. He objected to all that nasty text messing up his layout, my editors were mutinying over being told to write stories in 100 words or less, and at the same time I was dealing with BIX, BYTE’s text-based, newsgroup-predating BBS which had less than zero design. I must have felt really constrained because I went nuts with MY colors, my graphics…and somewhere along the line decided I was in love with gradient fills. (blush)

Thank heavens the pendulum swung the other way. Don’t have a picture of it, but within six months I was getting nosebleeds from all the color ramps, got my art director’s religion and went to a blessedly simple design. Then I got fancy again in 2000, this time with graphics:

2000

The whole site was built around a cute picture I’d taken of my cat carrying a cherry around in his mouth when he was a kitten. The cat grew up, though, and got less cute, so things evolved again, to something that I really, really liked and still do.

2001

This one broke away from the idea of columns and boxes, and simply threw stuff up wherever it was on the page (of course, there’s a layout grid going on in the background, but it wasn’t supposed to LOOK that way). This one got some awards for design, but also had its detractors–unexpected doesn’t work well for regular visitors, and several people asked if I’d recently gotten religion because the thing at the top looked like the Christian fish symbol. (Honestly, all I wanted was a sweeping swoosh…)

Besides, it was a genuine pain in the neck to alter the images and make settings for them. It’d take me an hour to make the content, and three hours to find and fix up the images. So I sought something simpler.

This one brought back the cherry (notice it in the logo), lasted for quite awhile, and it sent me in the direction of dark-backgrounded personal sites. Commercial sites, where your money’s riding on the speed with which people can “get” your site, often need a white/light site for reasons I won’t go into.

But on a personal site, you don’t particularly care if anyone finds, reads, and understands the stuff. Plus, if you’re going to be graphics-based instead of text-based, which many personal sites are, light transmission (instead of reflection) tends to make the graphics pop and glow more than it does on a white background.

Anyway, I kept that element in the new site–for this iteration, unless there’s text that needs to be read, I’m showcasing the graphics on black.

We’ll see how well this works as the new site settles into its paces. The cool thing about personal websites is that you don’t have a usability legacy to worry about so you CAN redesign whenever you get the urge. I plan to.

Transom Window

[Read more]

The Clever Woman of Santa Abuelita

By Cynthia Morgan
(Copyright 2006, All rights reserved on this one)

Of all the poor villages in the otherworld, the village of Santa Abuelita was the poorest. Crouched in sere yellow hills, barely able to feed its hardworking peasants, Santa Abuelita could boast of little but its tiny chapel.

The chapel itself was unremarkable but the villagers tended it lovingly. They propped up its tilting walls, painted the red-gold doors each spring and carefully polished its magnificent colored glass window. The window featured a glowing Virgin Mary so beautiful, it was said, that it could grant the deepest wish of the heart, if it prayed long enough.

[Read more]

At last! A blog of my own!

So, about three months ago I decided to implode the blogosphere a bit; instead of using blogspot I’d put a blog on my own site.

Famous last words.

Never mind that my own website, morganica.com, hadn’t really been updated in two years (hey–when you do this stuff for a living the one thing you never have time for is your own site, right?)

Never mind that the reason I hadn’t done more was that there was something screwy with my host configuration and I’d never really had time to fix it. I’d swapped hosts a couple of years ago after a monumental screwup by my previous webhost that trashed several months’ worth of work..but the files migrated with one of those snafus that takes one second to create and 18 hours to find and correct. I’d finally concluded that it would be faster to redesign the whole site. (It was)

Never mind that using someone ELSE’s blog is simple, quick, and easy.

Nope. I had to have my own. So in (another) impulse buy, I acquired a copy of Movable Type, dusted off my ftp client and some rather rusty PHP skills, and set to work. Four hours later, I discovered the little pitch on the SixApart site that offers to install the software on your server and set up your first blog, make sure everything’s running well, and get you going…for $99.

Sold.

And there began one of the longer-running sagas of my web career. If there was a way to misconfigure the site, it happened. I got to know Sarah, my MovableType installer, far better than either of us planned. I got to know ValueWeb, my new host, much better, too, as we traveled through server moves, uninstalls and reinstalls, redirections, wierd propagation errors, and some incredibly funky error messages.

It’s enough to make me retire my techie stripes (those that haven’t rusted, anyway). After a 1:00 AM session this morning, ValueWeb finally found the problem, reset a setting or three, and I was in business.

Now to start uploading old posts and adding new. I mostly blog for the helluvit, not because I want anyone to read it, but in true web marketeer fashion I can’t stand the idea of not having a critical mass of content on a new site.

So…please bear with me while I upload a bunch of old junk. I promise to be more discriminating as the new site settles in.

The lipstick

The lawyer wears her hair as some wear mink, a black pelt cascading down her back. It covers the small scar on her forehead, memento of the only time her mother ever struck her. She told me that the blow plunged her into shocked silence; protection, she now knew, from the hungry soldiers who’d come that night for her sister.

She was 12 and her parents’ money was gone to grease a headlong flight from Manila and the Marcos regime. But Papa had made a fatal mistake: he’d trusted others to pay off the watchers at the border. One bribe from freedom, they were trapped. The commander had come with a solution: He’d long admired the older daughter. If she stayed behind with him, he’d look the other way while the family escaped.

The alternative? Probable death in a stinking camp.

[Read more]