Room to Ruminate
Things change around here all the time. We don't presume to tell you how to define "beast" — what with that being such a personal issue, and all — but we will tell you right up front that "beast" pretty much defines the nature of it here. That being understood at the outset …
We really didn't make any effort to "republish" the entire Members' Area like the vast majority of web companies would do. First of all, it would take a really, really long time to go back and manually redo tens of thousands of pages, and actually we'd rather spend our time hanging out with beautiful naked women. Secondly, we've never made any claims on being any sort of "Official Web Company" with a dozen (or even dozens) of employees, and so we don't see how some "uniform" look makes any difference in our situation. Lastly, although most of us that have been here a long time now look back and laugh (or more likely groan) at the way we used to present the site, we're not really embarrassed about it. Just as people have changed over the years, so has our representation.
Quite honestly, almost all of the truly Geeky additions have come from talented technical people that just lent us their expertise for the duration of a project or so and then sent us on our merry way. In other words, it's true: We have always relied on the kindness of strangers.
Then, rather than wait until "it was all done" we decided just to put this renovation up in phases. Even though it looks different now about 95% of the changes here were in the (invisible) code areas. We're hoping to make the site a lot more accessible for a wider variety of mediums, and we're hoping to make it work a lot faster and more efficiently, even from your traditional computer at your desk. We've also decided to go ahead and use some more modern technology in the way that we present the "data" – such as the way this "folder" group works, and the way the Menu Bar opens and closes. Again, this doesn't change what you're looking at precisely, but it does make it easier to jump around without having to make a bunch of clicks or open/reload a bunch of pages. At least that's the theory here, and if you can't have the practice, you should at least have a theory we've always thought.
That "phase" theory in mind, we promised to point out that the ... um ... design that you see on many of the pages, including this one really exists only as a place-holder for Phase II of the plan. We didn't want to have to redo all the pages to different specified widths later. It's hard enough doing it the first time, and no matter what anyone tells you, this is NOT "Crown Molding on Acid" .... Actually we got comments in-house from "pretty" to "busy" or even "garish" – and you can probably guess which of those people got a raise for the new year. This has taken a long series of very busy weeks to get even this far along, and we have found that after awhile you don't even notice the graphic anymore. So there's hope for at least some semblance of sanity at least somewhere down the road ....
