Dull Day

My confession here is that I still don’t know HTML all that well.

We had a sort of emergency thing this morning, where a radio station’s client needed to have their pages fixed quickly – and threatened to withdraw the rest of their business for the year. I worked a bit to get things updated, and felt sick to my stomach most of the morning. I wasn’t clear on what I was doing, and basically felt like I was hacking through things.

Long day today. Lots of little side questions and problems and fires to put out. Some tasks validated my abilities; others made me feel like a fraud.

I stayed a bit late to finish up a Flash Music Player for one of the New York stations. But then I started digging into a few HTML/Template files, and got obsessed and tried to figure shit out. It was semi-successful, and I think I learned a bit… but I still need more time with HTML.

I feel ridiculous. Most of the online friends I talk to know HTML like they know the back of their hands. I got into Flash almost by accident, and came to it from a writing background. Since I don’t know HTML all that well, I’m not really a programmer; since I’m still struggling with image manipulation/creation, I’m not quite a designer. I’m in this nether-area, sort of in between. Some days, I feel like I know what I’m doing… others, I feel like I don’t belong behind a keyboard.

Everyone that knows it tells me HTML is easy to pick up. And perhaps I need to set aside a weekend, and just dig through a book. I dunno… at work, most times when I’m given a problem I can suss things out and find what’s wrong. But I’m slowly learning HTML from a troubleshooting approach – I’m given a problem to solve, and I solve it.

Some days, I feel really techy and nerdy and feel like I know my shit, that I can make really complex things appear unified, synchronized, simple. Other days, I feel like I can’t even pronounce my own fucking name.