So obviously as you all can see, we - I say we in a loose sense since Ann helps with the website content, or at least is starting to :) - have updated the look of our website. For non-technical people, they are probably pretty amazed at the site. For technical/web-saavy people, they might be mildly impressed, but I must vent.

I borrowed the look of this site from one of the Microsoft Asp.Net Starter Kits and it has basically caused me more headaches than I could have imagined. I do like the site's look but I can not believe how much work it was to get the site to 'behave' and have things show up the way I wanted. I basically ended up only taking a couple 'images' and colors from the starter kit and starting from scratch :O but I finally got this beast to behave and look pretty good - in my opinion - while doing it.

So all is good in Aney Web Land right?! Hell no...for a little amusement I opened the site in FireFox (a browser alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer - you can try it here if you want, it is a nice browser but I can't bring myself to divorce myself from IE) and of course all of my site 'layout' was screwed up. I don't know how many hours I spent trying to get the thing to work right in FireFox - more than a couple all nighters which at my age isn't as easy as it used to be :S I read countless articles on the web describing how to do things 'correct' but I couldn't get my stuff to work. I'd get something working in FireFox and it wouldn't work in Internet Explorer, and then vice versa.

On top of all that, all this pain I 'kind of' being brought upon myself. In reality, the 'layout' of my site is pretty simple/standard - it has a header and two columns of content. How hard could it be right?! I could have easily used HTML Tables to get the layout I wanted, but supposedly HTML Table support is 'going away' at some point. All web browsers recommend using CSS as your layout option. Now, anyone reading this that 'knows' what HTML/CSS is knows that Table support will most likely (if ever) only be unsupported after me, my children, and my grandchildren are all dead and buried but I couldn't convince myself to do something that seemed so 'morally' wrong ;) So because of this thick headed, stubborn, [insert adjective] attitude I had, I spent more hours on this site that I probably should have (I'm currently sick with some strand of cold - probably brought on from the no rest).

To wrap it up, please someone be using FireFox so my efforts were not in vain. And to everyone that was 'so impressed' with the website, or at least fained it, thanks. I did put a lot of work into it, just spent way more time on parts of it that I 'shouldn't have had to' (i.e. the stupid layout instead of putting cool new features/blogs/etc. into it).