Finally, I Can Pimp My MySpace Page

I'm a retarded fucking web designer. That's no metaphor, either—when it comes to web design, I'm as big a halfwit mongoloid as they come. Talk of DIVs and absolute positioning and style sheets leaves me spitting and shitting and sputtering like crazy and the amount of key-jingling (in the form of friendly, comfortable print design) it takes to calm me down has been steadily increasing for years.

Yeah, I've designed a few websites. Simple things, cobbled together using Dreamweaver and amatuerish bits of html and JAVA, that look and act mostly like I envisioned them when they were just sketches on paper, but their duct-tape-and-baling-wire code and execution always bothered me. Profesh web designers chided me for my DW crutch, bloated code, and hacky workarounds. I tried to change, to evolve. I really did. Time and again I sat down with TextEdit and a browser, trying to get a handle on all those lines of baffling code. CSS eluded me. I pored over websites and books and message boards. Tried new angles, new ways of thinking. Took every bit of advice and instruction. Still I couldn't make a go of it, always falling back into my familiar, clumsy Dreamweaver ways.

But no more! I will not be HTML's bitch one second longer. Not since I found Coda, a miraculous little application that has finally made web design graspable to me. "One-window web development," the tagline given to Coda by Panic, is, in my experience, both completely true and wholly insufficient.

Yes, Coda's interface design lets me generate, test, and edit code all in the same window. But what's more incredible is how it's lifted the fog from my tiny pea brain and snapped web design into brightshiningcrystalclear focus for me. Suddenly it all makes sense—and it's so easy! The revelations brought on by Coda make me feel retarded again, but a different kind of retarded. Now I feel dumb for not getting web design sooner, easier.

I'm still green, still feeling my way around this new world of tags and selectors, but I'm feeling really good about it. Any of youse need a website built? This web design stuff is a piece of cake.

No Cuts, No Butts, No Coconuts

Man, last weekend was fun. If you ever get a chance to spend a couple days in the Blue Ridge Mountains, sipping vodka lemonades and grilling delicious food with a bunch of super-silly peeps, do it. Seriously.

Kelly Erickson Has It All Figured Out

This stuff makes me so mad.

No fucking doy men and women think and act and process differently. (Psst, they also have different privates. No lie!)

How bad sitcom writers and marketing gurus like Kelly Erikson (Obsessed with your success!") get paid scads of money to boil those differences down to their most broad-stroked, stereotypical base is beyond me. According to Kelly Erikson, anything designed, bought, sold, written, manufactured, or desired is done so with one simple tenant in mind: Girls think with their brains! Boys think with their dinks! Girls consider the future. Boys want everything right now. Blah, blah, fucking blah. (Statistics, studies, or citations to back these assertions up, it seems, are relevant to neither men nor women, as they appear nowhere in Erikson's essay.)

Nonetheless, kudos to you, Kelly Erikson, for your brills social acumen. I hope your thoroughly modern views make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. But just in case that whole marketing consultant thing doesn't pan out, I hear Veronica's Closet is coming back and they're looking for someone to write a killer bit about diet TV dinners in pink boxes.