Home Again

I don’t recall when the PHP computer scripting language was released, I do recall when I first looked it over I ran screaming to my bedroom and cowered under the covers until hunger eventually forced me out of bed. The fact that I considered the abilities of those extolling it’s virtues in the same laudatory realm as technical opinions of ditch-diggers and insurance salesmen didn’t help. Fortunately by that time in my career I no longer had to learn new languages unless they interested me and so I could blithely pretend it didn’t exist.

Then Blogger decided to abandon me and countless others who had been using it’s tools to host our independent blogs. WordPress was clearly the best alternative, even though it used PHP for scripting. After finally managing to get my content from the Blogger version of Seriously Good into WordPress — discovering along the way that all presentation effects had been lost — it was time to swallow my revulsion and delve into PHP.

I wish I could say that what you are looking at now is a result of my heroic stoicism and ability to rapidly assimilate a new technology, but it’s not. What you are looking at now is the incredibly kind and expert efforts of a fellow About.com guide. Her name is Lahle Wolfe.

Monday evening out of sheer frustration I posted an email message to a list-server venting about having to change blogging software, learn a new language (that I knew I hated), and losing my minimal ad revenue in the meantime. (BlogHer covers my utility bill as long as the weather is neither hot nor cold.) Tuesday morning Lahle offered to help.

Lahle is the About.com guide to Women in Business. Her particular business is L.A. Wolfe Web and she specializes in SEO optimization and Web site design. Having known her on-line for a couple of years I already had a high estimation of her abilities and knowledge. But, Damn, she’s good!

Wolfe doesn’t claim expertise in the visual elements of Web design, a disclaimer I highly approve of. She has a good eye and good understanding of the issues, but the banner you see at the top of SG is the product of an excellent graphic artist (adapted to my prejudices) and is far better than what I originally came up with. The same is true of Lahle’s Web design. I’ve looked at her code and it almost makes sense – it’s as clean and well-crafted as you could hope for. It will certainly make a lot of sense once I get over the learning curve. A key element, perhaps the key element, of competence is knowing where your competence lies. Aside from bread I avoid baking, I have no competence there. I piddle with desserts, but that’s it. Lahle knows how to code for the Web.

Anyway, by last night I had a working WordPress blog on a dummy site I’d set up. This afternoon we went live. It’s not an exact match, but it would have been if I’d asked for it. I didn’t want to take on a redesign at this point and Ms Wolfe did a truly amazing job of capturing the existing design, which has worked fine for the past couple of years.

I am in the process of going through my 900-odd posts (yes, I suffer from logorrhoea) to add tags and categorize them (something I’ve long-desired). Stay tuned, good things will come of this forced migration not least because of the work done by Lahle Wolfe. I am in her debt and if you need a supremely competent Web designer…

2 Responses to “Home Again”