What is "one word" that would describe your site?
Actually, just typing in "trygve" works in most browsers...
...but that's not what you meant; if I could get anything
down to just one word, that ought to merit a gold star or
something like that. Maybe we will go with "dilettante"
here too. Or, "diverse" if that goes over better with the
PR department.
Whatever the word is, it does make it tough with web directories which insist that it needs to fit neatly into just one category. I haven't been able to work up to such a Procrustean editing job, so I'll just deal with being hard-to-categorize.
Because of your site do you consider yourself a Web celebrity, an exhibitionist, a public figure, a writer, an innovator, or something different?
Except for "innovator," I probably stand a good chance of qualifying
for all of those (especially "something different"). An exhibitionist,
of course, though maybe I'm more of a "show-off" because I wouldn't
put just anything up for the public to view, only those things that I
thought at least stood a chance of being interesting and entertaining.
I wouldn't, for that reason, put up a webcam; the only potentially interesting thing about watching me edit code, render assorted video projects, and the rest of the stuff I do most of the time is that it might be amusing to someone not used to it to see someone who's never learned to touch-type (me) hammering away at a couple of keyboards at once in front of the array of 20"+ monitors that are displaying the various tasks I'm working on at any given moment. Well, that and my habit of sitting in strange positions quite unlike any of those that chairs are actually designed for.
But I think any potential excitement level of that would be tapped out inside of thirty seconds. And that's on a good day.
My best (or perhaps weirdest) "Web Celebrity" story at the moment comes from a few months back. For the sake of context, I'll mention that I probably get recognized about half the time I'm out in public, at least by someone who speaks up about it, so having someone recognize me while I'm waiting in a checkout line and strike up a conversation is pretty much standard operating procedure.
But there I was, waiting in a longish checkout line, and the woman behind me, out of the blue, just starts telling me that she'd been looking through my website. There were some things she liked, some things she wanted to see more of, and she was wondering about the techniques I'd used on a couple of pictures in particular (one clamp-on light from a hardware store, the red side of a reflective car dashboard protector, and a digital camera with a self-timer--just so you know).
So we chatted about that kind of stuff for a while and eventually I got to the front of the line, got checked out, and went about the rest of my business.
About twenty minutes later, it abruptly struck me that she'd never said anything like, "hey, aren't you so-and-so?" or "would you happen to have the Trygve.Com website...?" She'd just kicked things off, without question or preamble, by mentioning that she'd been looking at my website.
That's probably a good sign. I think. At least it's a sign of something.
How do you tackle the mechanics of Web design and how do you deal with your frustrations when you can't do what you envision.
The only thing that I find really frustrating is tracking down some
of the more bizarre Netscape bugs that can totally screw up pages
that look great in Explorer, or even that look fine in other versions
of Netscape or under different resolutions with the same version. That
may be partly because I'm used to previewing things as I go in Explorer
and I normally only use Netscape and Lynx for checking the page
afterwards. Explorer lets you get away with a lot of mistakes that
will make Netscape completely weird out--and Netscape will also
totally mangle some pages that are not only 100% correct HTML, but
which are even very simple and tiny.
Sometimes I have to make a copy of the webpage and then keep deleting parts of it until I'm down to the smallest set of lines that will still screw up Netscape. Then when I've figured out a work-around (which is hardest when there's nothing technically wrong with the code, it just happens to trip up one of Netscape's page-rendering bugs), I can go back through the original page and implement the revised version that works under both Explorer and Netscape.