It occurs to me that I haven't written an editorial for quite some time. Those of you who follow my web site closely should have been writing me indignant letters complaining about my remissness in this matter. I haven't received any such letters. This could mean that I have no faithful readers; I prefer to think that it merely means that they are lax in their censorious efforts.
My faithful readers will have noticed that I have added a new motto to my home page - "Slum City Of The Mind". Slum City, indeed. I will have you know that I have received many compliments on my web pages, remarks such as sprawling, weird but amusing, and My God, man, don't you have anything better to do with your time. Sprawling it certainly is - I keep adding (very) random pages every so often. Unfortunately they are mostly in certain specific areas. The effect is indeed that of a sprawling city of slums in which the ramshackle tar paper shack sections keep spreading. It clearly behooves me to add a bit of taste, a few structures of intellectual elegance, a bit of class. That's the ticket. I shall bring forth new pages, pages that inspire and enthrall. This is my shining vision of the future. I shall start on it immediately.
Almost immediately. Real soon now. Yeah, right.
One of the things that adds to the aura of sluminess is that I don't do very much in the line of la-de-la graphics. There are no graphics maps, no java applets flying little piglets across the screen, no frames. You are free to believe, if you choose to do so, that this represents an ideological purity on my part, a revulsion against the mindless proliferation of meaningless graphics and gaudy nothingness on the web. If you do I will salute you for the nobility of your beliefs. However I strongly suggest that you purchase nothing that is offered you for sale over the phone and that you never, ever watch infomercials.
The truth is, of course, that I edit raw HTML files with an editor. I have learned a few of the simpler tricks of the trade - I know how to change fonts and make tables. I have a stock of bars and buttons and such trash. I have template files to start with so that mostly I just type in text along with the paragraph tags. Some one of these days I will get around to doing some artsy-fartsy multimedia web pages for people who want that sort of thing. Some day. In the mean time, Slum City, here I come.
This page was last updated June 10, 1997.