More light reading

If you want to call it that.

I've spent the better part of this evening familiarizing myself with some of the freebie apps that GoDaddy offers and even does the installs for you. You know what this means. Yup. I'm finally going to get ScrappingViolet.com launched.

For those of you not in the loop (if there ever was a loop - I suspect I kept the bulk of this info inside my head, which is a scary, scary place), ScrappingViolet.com was this brilliant idea I had to launch my own scrapping & paper crafting-related e-zine. I was going to post tips and tricks about photography, scrapbooking, card making, altered items, etc. Talk a little about basic design principles, techniques for newbies, my favorite tools and products. Stuff like that. Yeah, I know there's places like that already, but I don't feel the need to grovel and beg for the opportunity to post and write about my take on things. I wanted things on my terms. Plus I figure I'm savvy enough to get my site picked up by search engines, maybe even do a very modest amount of pay-per-click. After all, I do pay the bills by pimping myself out as an interactive marketer.

Unfortunately life got in the way. My extreme burnout when it comes to designing and building websites got in the way - hence why this blog still looks exactly the way it did a year ago. Hence why my professional site looks exactly the way it did when I launched the thing nearly four years ago. Add to that the fact that I can't code my way out of a paper bag. I had these grandiose plans of using an open source content management system to organize everything and have all these fancy categories for everything I wanted to feature and write about. Sadly, I've never been more than a kick-ass web designer who knows enough about the back-end to be dangerous. Very dangerous. The IT guys don't like me playing too close to the big, expensive equipment with all the blinky lights. For good reason too. Some day I'll resurrect an old blog (well, back then they were called "personal home page") posting from 1998 or 1999 that talks about the day I took down a whole network whist trying to upload an intranet update. Good times. I think that site sits on a CD or Zip disk (remember those?) somewhere gathering dust.

So I'm going to give this a go again. Only I'm going to keep it simple to start. I'm going to make it a blog. Blogs can be categorized. By date or by topic. I can have everything just the way I want it. With a simple design. Ample room for shameless plugs and tasteful advertising (gotta keep the lights on, right?). If this thing takes off, then I will seriously look into moving everything over to a CMS (oh Aim - are your ears burning???). I may even add a forum. For now, let's just see how long it takes me to get this project revived and off the ground. Who knows - I may even do a gallery... off to read about that...

P.S. GO DUCKS!