over the hump

With a somewhat stressful week half behind us, I march on toward the weekend when I can turn my attentions back to redesigning my website, a responsibility that has been four years stagnant....and it shows. I've learned a great deal about web design in that time. So much, in fact, that I'm truly embarrassed at the way it currently looks. I'm tempted to put up the new site even if it's not done - just cuz it's better half baked than what I've got now.

But I digress - my point is, and I do have one, that there are two very important pieces of software that I've come to loathe of late.

1. Microsoft's Front Page. It inserts a lot of crap code that dirties the water and throws errors left and right. While it might be "user friendly" for some (and was the only thing - I thought - available to me at the time I first built my site some 5+ years ago), in reality it causes more problems than it fixes.

This time 'round I'm using html kit which is free (bonus). But, for all I use it for, I might as well create the pages using any 'ol text editor. I write the code by hand, as it were, not using automatic tag inserts, GUI, or other bell and whistle effects. I don't use any of html kit's functions other than it's automatic changing of the font colors according to the code, and I do find that helpful to my eyes if nothing else. That feature alone has made using html kit worth using.

2. AOL's AIM instant messaging. I was asked to install this chat client as part of UK Libraries Blue 2.0 experiment. I have found no redeeming qualities about AIM. AOL, in my mind, has become the Microsoft of personal communication. They're proprietary and invasive, wrecking havoc on browsers and performance overall, what with the download of peripheral goop like games. Compared to other chat clients I've used AIM doesn't come close to being user friendly or rightly functional. I really don't understand, given the chat clients that are freely available, why Blue 2.0 chose such an invasive species.

And that's my rant for today -