So I’m sitting at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight by reading blogs from back when I first discovered the activity. Hats off to LukeLog and Meg (who used to be NotSoSoft back in the day). Reading as these kids / folks / people really invested a lot of effort in exploring the form. I certainly won’t get in to who discovered what when, but for me these folks were pioneering. It was through them that I discovered MeFi which actually was side linked from the Underground IIRC.

What really strikes me now is how conversant they were with the form. Not necessarily the most technically / design / content incline but definitely the best at reviving the vanity site of yore. For me they hit the right balance between geek, personal life, and connections. It was all quite inspiring as I was just starting to rediscover the web myself after years of no computer and no connection. I was testing the waters with graduate school and information science and I saw how I could integrate what they’re doing with my own ideas about information presentation and retrieval.

At the same time I was also working with/for a guy who was strictly old school in the technology department. Not that he didn’t have nice toys or shunned new technology (although he does the latter somewhat) but he was rigid about the least tool necessary for a task. We did not use a graphical IDE for development. We definitely shunned the use of flash and minimized the images. We were on the edge w/r/t implementing CSS driven sites. Server-side scripting? Rriiiiigggghhht.

I’ve taken a lot of that forward with me. In my MIS program I was a bit snobbish about the HTML and code my classmates generated. I often let this snobbery get in the way of appreciating the larger lesson. Moving into my first real, bona fide professional position I made my life a great deal more difficult because of some zealous adherence to an amalgamation of XHTML Strict / CSS / 508c / Nielsen rules. Now at my most recent position I am still fighting my first boss’s battles.

And I’m really not sure it’s worth it. Either that or I’ve ended up in the wrong place professionally. Slowly but surely, the web design field is moving beyond my skill set. I’m very focused on programmatic solutions and automated text processing while the broader audience could care less about these things. I keep waiting for the vindication. Well, okay, the CSS / XHTML thing is starting to pay off. But I’ve got staff who think nothing of bundling instructional tutorials in Flash instead of interactive DHTML. I’m falling behind playing with AJAX because I continue to have to keep the bailing wire web site I inherited together. And I don’t have the opportunity to pursue this on my own time because I’ve elected to try having a social life and meaningful relationship outside of work.

Then there’s the whole missing out on ontologies and metadata angle which was the thing that most interested me in school. I just cannot seem to find an entry into the professional ranks and now I’m not even certain what’s left of my knowledge is even relevant.

And so I whine as I sit at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight…