Dear Diary: Medieval
Oh, the things that I was going to do today!
Here’s one of them: if you’re reading this at Portico, you’ll see a bold-faced list of links to the left. Not the “New at Portico” links, but the ones below the centered asterisks. That is a list in dire need of a re-think. (If you’re reading this at The Daily Blague, click here for a look.)
Just for the heck of it, I inserted a much-needed link. Can you find it? It wasn’t there yesterday!
Here’s the deal: Portico is ten years old. My dear daughter, the expectant and imminent mother of my first grandchild, designed it in her spare time in the annus mirabilis 2000. (Maybe in 1999, but I think it was after Y2K.) Some of the code that Megan wrote is still in use, and the site itself is still a “frameset.” Some of the menus are tables, and some of them aren’t. Periodic upgrades and revampings have not been consistent throughout Portico. The navigation system has its own history. (It answers the question, “What was he thinking?”) The whole site is like a pleasant old English manor house, to which successive dukes and earls have added wings in the latest style. (A characteristically grandiose comparison, wouldn’t you say — until you kept reading.) I used to say, back when the site was new, that I envisioned it as a kind of space station, to which new stuff would be added from time to time in no particular fashion; in the virtual world, as in the extraterrestrial, the absence of gravity means that overall design needn’t be visibly coherent. But I think I’ve carried that idea beyond its tensile strength.
So: if I couldn’t find the time to overhaul a brief menu today, when, d’you suppose, am I going to find the time to reorganize all of Portico? Happily, I know the answer. I am going to reorganize all of Portico when a vision of how it ought to look befalls me. When that happens, I’ll be a difficult person to be around for a week or two, and everything but my personal hygiene will be neglected. Until then, I shall plod along in sweetly medieval fashion, higgledy-piggledy to all appearances but really always doing whatever it is that seems right at the time. The problem with doing what seems right at the time is fixing all the old stuff that doing so suddenly renders wrong.
Lately, I’m in love with this page (at Portico). It ought to be the “index” page — the page that opens first — but I’m still in love with the blurry scan of that Pennell print (blurry because the print is in a frame), with nothing but Portico imprinted upon it — an idiosyncrasy that has provoked complaints from quite a number of friends, and doubtless frustrated many more unknown visitors. For years, this page labored under the moniker “Vestibule,” a bad idea for which I have a very hard time accepting responsibility. Now, it’s the most happening page that I’m working on.