such a dork!

Now I've gone and done it...

Well, after talking about this silly thing for months, I've finally decided to sit down and do it.

And, as is my nature, I overthought it nearly to death. I already had a title and a purpose, so those weren't sticking points. No, the real question was this: where to host it?

The obvious choice would be LiveJournal. Several friends and at least one sibling have LiveJournal accounts, and posting it there would enable me to make use of the social features they have (I could finally be on somebody's friends list, and wouldn't that be a thrill?).

But I'm not particularly fond of LiveJournal (despite having claimed to be in a cover letter I once sent them; I am nothing if not mercenary). Their pages are -- and my apologies to those friends who have them -- rather ugly most of the time. For reasons I still don't understand, comment threading doesn't work in Firefox. And the code... it's just hideous.

I'm something of a code nazi, you see. Ask my coworkers. Few things make me happier than being able to fit the code for an entire web page on a single screen because it's that clean and concise. Every time I look at a new site, I hit "view source." It's a compulsion; I can't help it. Half the time, I haven't even consciously decided to do it.

So therein lay my criteria: I have to like the look, and I have to like the code.

It would suite the rigorous logician in me to state that I investigated many options, compared features, and maybe even went so far as to interview satisfied and dissatisfied users. I am, however, supremely lazy and did none of these things. Fortunately, I had encountered a number of Blogger pages before, and always liked the look of them.

So I checked out the code. The pages have an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (which I'll likely explain in a later post somewhere), which is good. They're technically not valid XHTML -- meaning they're not correctly written -- but only because the JavaScript included in the pages hasn't been correctly marked as character data (again, something I'll attempt to expain at a later point). So I figured I'd give it a go.

When I got to the part where you select your blog's template, I noticed that they listed the designers for each template. Jeffrey Zeldman. Dave Shea. Douglas Bowman. The very people whose articles I read when I'm trying to figure out how to make my own code better.

And that's all I needed.

posted by Smitty @ 5:46 PM