Birthday Surprise
Meddysong’s gone live today. It seemed the right time.
Today is my girlfriend’s 24th birthday. This all links together, have no fear.
Before we met, she had a blog. And no computer. She still doesn’t, actually. I’ve never seen anyone as dextrous with a mobile phone as is Radio. Anyway, this was a Blogger thing.
Some months later, she decided to start a new one, having felt that the previous one lacked a certain happiness in its content. There may have been issues with Blogger too; I don’t recall.
So she started a new blog, this time using Windows Live Spaces. This one seemed to be going better; the frequent absence in posting were a sign of happiness, she apologetically posted one day.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go too well in her life owing to some horrifying medical problems, and she felt that this blog too had become depressing. She of good conscience didn’t want to cope with the thought that her readers might become somewhat unhinged at the content, and that blog was sent to the graveyard.
For some time, I had been talking about starting my own web page. I thought it might be nice to offer her one too.
However, I don’t tend to do things conventionally. I’m not a computer guy really, so I designed a couple of designs using imagery, and then attempted to hack them into tables.
I was quite impressed when they started to work; my dummy content displayed perfectly. Except … in Firefox, where every line would overwrite previous ones.
So, to the backburner went these ideas.
In the interim, my buddy Gavan asked me whether I’d join him in scripting something for the youth Esperanto movement in the UK. Gav’s a pro, so I was happy to sit under the learning tree. All I had to do was leave him to cook the meal; I was going to add the sprig of parsley at the end.
Having sat with him whilst we created the jebsite, I hit upon an idea: “If we can build the jebsite on WordPress, then I can do the same with mine.” And that was that. I handled the design of the jebsite; I handled the design of the jeb forums; I’d handled the design of my own sites, except for having a motor by which to power them. WordPress provided the solution.
So, I started speaking to the Radio about this website I’d promised to make her, just so I could pick off titbits of information about whether she would want her full name to appear on a site, how she’d respond if asked “tell me something about yourself in a sentence” (whence the tagline on her site), and so forth.
Well, on the day of her 24th birthday, I linked her to it. She had no idea that it was coming, seeing as I’ve been “too busy doing other people’s site”. To say that she’s happy is an understatement. You can read her reaction in her jeb forums’ birthday thread.
So yes, this is what she woke up to this morning. (She’s madly, totally enamoured with ducks, hence the theme.)
Well, this all being the case, it made sense to do the same thing with Meddysong, since that was originally one of the themes for her site.
Hence, Meddysong’s springing to life on Radio’s birthday.