web woes and happy endings

I spent a large portion of my weekend grumbling at my computer. Sure, there’s a beautiful placeholder up at www.rinaslayter.com, but for some reason, the website I’m building behind it is aggravating me.

See, I’m not a programmer. I really don’t know how to build websites. I use ingenuity, patience and determination to figure stuff out and have mostly learned enough to be dangerous. When my other two websites were handed to me [www.fictionados.com and www.ashleighraine.com], the hardest stuff had already been done. Yeah, I went in and tweaked some code, but the rest has all been duplicating and modifying pages, not building them from a blank screen.

I’m adventurous. I love a little [or a lot] of challenge, but I’m experiencing frustration at the current creation of my website. The sad part is that I’ve got a ton of text formatted and ready to go. All I gotta do is drop it into a site, but if that site won’t come together…well…you understand my frustration.

I did get the homepage together. It’s mostly empty, but all the links work. I did get one subpage together. It’s got my bio on it and all the links work. But as for the aforementioned stack of content ready to drop in…Absolutely nada.

Yeah, I probably bit off more than I could chew in thinking I’d have the thing together enough to input text, but that has NEVER stopped me before. I always think big.

And I usually make my goals.

One of my prior employers was called as a reference. He said, “Rina often bites off more than she can chew, takes on huge projects and when they get into crunch time, she works her ass off to make sure they’re done on time.”

And that is so true about me even though up until that point, I’d never realized it. I don’t think I’ve EVER missed a deadline. If I did, it wasn’t a big enough infraction that I remember it right now.

My background is in theatre. The show must go on. That’s where I learned to be early on a deadline. My lighting designs were always turned in a week early, hung as soon after that as possible and my cues were always written and loaded into the light board before technical rehearsals. It made for a better show because the hard part was done and I could focus on editing, tweaking, making the show truly shine. [sorry about the bad lighting pun]

I’m just glad the only deadline for my website was my own personal goal. If there’d been an outside force asking for the site, I doubt I would’ve gotten any sleep at all last night!

Oh well. I’m happy with my progress and look forward to my next head-banging, hair-ripping-out, grumping, tea-drinking-marathon installment of work on my website because I can’t wait to toot my horn about it being up and running!!!!!

I gotta get used to this whole horn tooting thing. So I’m starting small.

…But after I go on a week’s vacation to stay in haunted California hotels…

See ya when I get back! Maybe I’ll have rinaslayter.com up shortly afterward. Or at least that’s my personal deadline.

Thankfully, “shortly afterward” is a vague amount of time!!!!!!

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