10 Things I’ve Learned During My First 10 Days With a Website
1. That my familiarity with publishing on the web is roughly equivalent to David Hasselhoff’s familiarity with great acting.
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2. That having a person who can serve as a “jungle guide” (or “help desk”) like Derrich is highly advisable.
3. *Correction*- #2 should read “a jungle guide willing to stay on the phone for hours saying things like ‘no, that’s a forward slash’, ‘press shift and the comma key’, and ‘g-o-o-g-l-e-dot-c-o-m’”
4. That the comprehensibility of HTML does not change if it is viewed upside down, in a mirror, or translated to Farsi.
5. That - ironically - despite the incomprehensible nature of HTML, just one “/” or “<" in the wrong place can do any or all of the following:
a) Create completely new ways to justify text ("one character vertical" was my favorite)
b) Convert text to obscure Arabic forms used only by Saudi mimes to blog about sand
c) Make every third word on your website disappear
6. That a truly accurate acronym would be FHTML, since I usually end up muttering a particular word immediately before I have to use or say “HTML”.
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7. That the reward for (a) reading a lengthy book called The Golden Spruce
I mean, seriously - who the hell is going to click on that? John Muir himself would just point and laugh. Is there some large, untapped market of ignorant conservationists and activist lumberjacks that I’m not aware of? Because I’m pretty sure that the CEO of Weyerhaeuser isn’t cruising the blogosphere, waiting to have a moment of clarity induced by a Google text advertisement:
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“Susie, get me the SVP of Raw Materials. Hello, Bob? It’s Bob. No, Bob the CEO. Listen, I just saw a Google text ad on RumblinFumblinStumblin.com. Apparently the kid’s bonkers for trees because he’s got about 500 damn ads on his website for something called sustainable forestry. Are we on that sustenance idea? Well why not? Get a pen - I’ll give you the website. Ready?”
“It’s ‘r-a-t-e-m-y-p-o-o-p-dot-c-o-m’.”
“No, wait. It’s ‘dot-e-d-u’.”
“Okay then. I want a report on it by next week… and make sure Google Adsense sends the BubbleStubble kid a check for two cents.”
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On second thought, maybe it’s just Google’s Trojan Horse method of policing the “no clicking on your own ads” policy, since any click on that ad would clearly be fraudulent. Anyway, I digress. Back to the countdown.
8. That the appropriate acronym for sustainable forestry is FSF (see #6). Okay, seriously, I will digress.
9. That there is no feeling of exhilaration quite like logging in to your Google Analytics account, discovering the “Absolute Unique Visitors” report, seeing the number “2″, and realizing that someone else - perhaps someone from Africa or Mongolia or even Berlin (!) - has taken the time to read the fruits of your labor, and maybe it made them laugh or think or otherwise enjoy themselves…
10. … until you realize that the other unique visitor was Derrich, trying to figure out how to remove the sustainable forestry code that he was certain was embedded in your website.
Popularity: 8% [?]
