I Can't Sleep...

and my stomach hurts. It's a bad night..

You know, once upon a time I had an actual website. Not just one of these blogger things, but an actual website that I made super cool layouts for. They were usually pink and involved some sort of retro theme. The first one was retro circles of varying transparencies in shades of hot pink, light pink, blue and green all on black background. The last one was based on the movie poster from Down with Love. It was heavily pink. I really wish I still had a screen cap of that layout. I have a copy of it somewhere but sadly it is on a floppy disc and I have no idea where I would find a computer that still has a disc inserter thing. There was also a rather cool jelly bean one. That one wasn't very pink.

That site was called Can't Sleep and I started it more 4 years ago while I was in the OAC. I called it Can't Sleep because I launched the site while I was ill with mono. I was exhausted all the time, yet unable to sleep because whole sections of my brain wouldn't shut up. It was a horribly frustrating time for me, so I decided to name my site in honour of that time. The full name was Can't Sleep: The Rantings of an Insomniac.

I miss it. I miss making the layouts, I miss coding them by hand, I miss the old school techniques of using notepad and FTP for running a site. Back then I had to use actual HTML codes to make paragraphs breaks or underline or insert links. Adding pictures to text required endless amount of resizing and cropping in paint or photoshop (I used paintshop pro 6.0 then 7.2 and later 8.0) then careful placement within text which often involved the hell known as tables within tables. And if I wanted spell check, I had to type the whole thing in word, then copy it to notepad while being careful not to break up the table or inline frame codings.

Changing layouts wasn't a simple operation requiring 4 minutes and 7 mouse clicks. It was a long process that took many hours or even days. You had to make the graphics, then cut them to precise measurements, then carefully place them in tables that fit those carefully cut graphics (which was my definition of torture. I still hate tables, they are PURE EVIL!) which usually took hours of figuring out why the columns have vi sable lines or why there is a space between images when there should be no space that you only figure out hours later was caused by an extra tap of the space bar in the exact wrong spot. There there was text coding and CSS style sheets to make the text match the graphics and cursors to match the text and alter the scroll bar colours so they didn't stand out like sore thumbs in your all black and pink layout.

After it was all done, back in the days before .php was common, you'd have to go through every page, and replace the coding so all your pages matched. A new layout never took me less than an entire day. And that was only for my inline frame layouts where I only had to replace the style sheets on the archive pages. The tabled layouts with no inlines took me entire weekends! After all that was done, you'd have to upload each file to an with an FTP program like my all time favourite, Coffee Cup FTP, and hope to God you didn't get timed out half way through.

I realize that about 95% of you have no idea what I am talking about, but to the 5% of you would there who remember life before blogger I ask, wasn't it worth it? Don't you miss the freedom and creativity of having a blog that was completely unique? I do, but sadly I have forgotten almost all HTML save for the most basic codes and I just don't have the time to spend on those lovely and reflective layouts anymore. C'est La Vie.