I apologize for the long gap in my “daily” posts. It isn’t that I have been ignoring this web site, it is because I have been using my time budget to change the website – hopefully for the better. The experience has been an interesting one that alternates between not having an idea of how to start, followed by experiments and frustrations, eventually calming down with a bit of “success” – only to realize that the success was but a stepping stone on an invisible path: then returning to not having an idea of how to start from that point.

I am finding this process to be highly frustrating because I have almost no “mental model” of how the web site works. The tool that I am using, Word Press, provides two views to the website creator. One view is through “blocks” of material (such as the drop down menu, the “sidebar” area, and the pages) that can be selected, moved around, modified in certain ways. This is fine for those that design by “messing around” – but that is not my style. I like to know “how it works.” For people like me, WordPress provides the completely opposite view – all of the html computer code that creates those blocks. So you can switch to that view and have much more control, but when I do it feels like I am faced with a big pile of letters and numbers in no particular order. Yicks! Does this mean I have to learn yet another computer language? Oh my goodness, that is a daunting task.

Perhaps I will eventually have to step off into the abyss and learn the version of html that is used because that seems to be my way of doing things. It reminds me of when I was first learning to drive. In those days a stick shift, with a clutch, was the option. I was having a hell of time using the clutch without jerking and jumping around. My friends mastered it quickly just be fiddling around until they “got it.” Not me, there was no amount of fiddling that was helping. Luckily, one of my brothers was working on his car and had the engine and transmission out of the car and on the shop floor. I took it apart until I could see what was in the bell housing where the clutch assembly “lives.” At that point I could see how the clutch worked, what levers and springs did what and why. From that moment on shifting smoothy was a piece of cake – I understood how it worked so I could make it work. I am having that problem again with this website. I still don’t know how it works, but it is slowly coming into focus.

So… please bare with me while I go through a period of changing, fixing, and hopefully improving the layout and presentation of the materials. I think it is getting better, but there is always a good possibility that I will completely change my approach and the look and feel will change a lot – or maybe not.