The Diary of a First Time Designer

Day 1:

I'm making a website.

Day 2:

Oh shit... I'm making a website?

Day 3:

I $@%!ing hate Photoshop and the g#%%^@n teacher who thought she was teaching me a mother $@%!ing thi... *commence seizures*

In all seriousness, I like Photoshop. It's just got a bitch of a learning curve.

Right now I'm designing the basic layout of the site. The top banners, where I want the text boxes to go, sign in box, fonts, colors, those sorts of things.

It's sloppy still, most things are leveled by eye, not computer, so maybe not completely level. I'll be able to fix that as I program it in. Just a loose blueprint for the most part.

I'm really happy with the idea I had for my header. Once I perfect the font, I think it's going to look super solid. My friend Tynan had a great idea to make something cleaner that I was really unhappy with, it'll look easily 10x better just by implementing this quick fix.

I'm going to implement a forum, which will be easy with phpBB (best open source forum out there). The point of this forum is to really create a community among the authors, a place where they can discuss the texts, plot development, world development, and everything else about writing.

Also, this is going to be the only place to lobby for their stories. Because it's vote based, it's going to be imporant to garner the support of other people. The forums will be key to having your voice heard, especially for the less established writers. I fully expect there to be alliances, groups banding together to push a certain plot line, using their collective brilliance to make the best story.

I've been encountering a lot of "So where do I go now?" as I progress. Being my first time, I'm not positive on how it's done. It's awkward and there's a lot of feeling around in the dark. (Seriously a lot of parallels to teen sex... Programs that work beautifully, if you know how to use them... The possibility of everyone finding out you're terrible... Shame.) I've been going a lot on the help of my friends. It's good to have people around who already know what they're doing. Tynan already runs several sites and my friend Pat knows a lot about coding and offered to help me with the more complicated stuff.

Resources are the best.

Other news:

Been having some off days lately. My initial "LET'S DO THIS" has tapered a bit, which is typical of me. But even with the reduced productivity, I'm still getting an assload more done than I was before.

I've had some depression spikes the last couple days, partly because of the reduced productivity, partly causing the reduced productivity. But, I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to get all the tests done that I need to for the neurotransmitters. In order to start that though, I started taking some 5-htp this morning (100mg, single serving) and after maybe 3 hours I already feel different up top. I feel BETTER. It may be mental, just thinking better because I took something, in the same sense that a placebo would work. But who cares. I FEEL better.

I've been bad about getting on my workout schedule. I'll workout today.

Simple.ology is going well. The small lessons are getting kind of annoying because it seems like I haven't done/learned much in the last week or so. But the daily praxes are due to start in two days I think. The computer programs are also frustratingly poorly written. I have a sloppy workaround for one, but the other won't even let me shut my computer down when it's running.

I can't understand that one.