October 31, 2007

My Double Life

Some time ago I spoke about my full time day gig at ThomasNet. At that point I was still getting the hang of everything. I was suddenly put in the html driver's seat with license to throw the switch to send our newsletters to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. After some trial by fire, I feel pretty comfortable with everything - even last minute email blasts with lots of edit change requests.

But this does not mean I am ready to say I'm an html expert on my resume by any stretch. I am a functioning newsletter production manager, but my html design skills are in need of an upgrade. Ask me to construct a table and I'm slouching at my computer for hours. The reality is I still don't understand everything about html and even less about CSS - and the latter is the basis of the way most pages are written. But I hate looking at CSS and figuring out how it controls everything. To be fair, I have no decent html editor resident on my computer. I downloaded this free editor N-Vu and try to work with it, but more often then not, I just end up moving stuff around and making a mess. So I continue with repurposing other people's code, pushing my dirty break tags into copy, chucking in my little href's and crossing my fingers. More often then not I am shocked that it works. RSS and xml feeds? php? That's for "other people".

What about music. Well, recently in September I took some time off. I arranged all my music, practiced diligently, hired musicians, gave them Sibelius generated music, and shared everything on a download page. I was more organized than I've ever been for a recording. How did it go?

More tomorrow...

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