The Tagalong Press Web Site
When the InterWebs first became available to mere mortals I was only peripherally involved in what's today called "educational technology." Soon enough, however, I learned that it was quite easy to use any number of software programs to build a web page. Of course back then all that really happened was the software's taking your graphical cues from mouse & keyboard settings and turning that into HTML, which was subsequently displayed more or less the way you want it to.
Over the course of time I soon enough learned the basics of HTML code, which allowed me to do things that the original design software either ignored or was outright incapable of fudging into what I wanted. Added to my growing understanding of how easy it was to use somebody else's design code for my own page work, this made it easy for me to dream up work-arounds in other folks' code so mine would look a bit different here or there in the process.
Then I discovered blogging.
Once I had my first blog up and verbose, I began looking at how the blog's basic background worked. Now this was a bit after I'd come to understand – for a little understanding as I might ever know – how consolidated style sheets (CSS) worked. Together with that knowledge and my working out the arcane code structure involved in the blog pages I eventually settled on a background and look that I could mess with and still find graphically inviting to readers.
Soon enough I set up my second blog, which was my first truly disbelief &/or anti-superstitionist writing. When I set that one up I took a different tack in the coding of the page lay out and eventually was able to adapt different versions of it for my third blog, a ham radio foray named after the ham radio gang I hung with back in the early 70s, Late Night Radio.
At about this point I went back over my then-extant web sites and gave them the renewed look of what I was happy with on my blogs. That, of course led me to cut back a lot on the stuff I'd done in web page construction and eventually clean up what was a real hell-hole of butchered code & horrible lay out.
Which brings us to today . . .
One of the many things that I liked about the InterWebs and the abililty for normal bean heads such as myself was the public exposure. And even when "they" said that such exposure only opened a person up to identity theft & all its wonders, I still thought "Nah, not me."
As if.
Simple fact is, and plainly put, having a web presence is like asking for trouble.
It's like living in a hippie house back in the 60s and hanging a big sign in the upstairs window that screams "BUST ME! BUST ME NOW!" at passing police cars.
And having gone through that once in my life, I'm reluctant to even think about having it happen again. Which it did, I might add, at some point in the not too distant past with the sudden appearance of six different people with my exact names on three or four web sites & chat/instant messenger boards.
Even one of my co-workers had a conversation with me while the real me was sitting right there next to my co-worker watching this all go down.
The wimp pussied out when I took the keyboard.
Undaunted by even that, I have kept some web presence for my ego to gloat over. Along the way I managed to clean up my basic pages and even develop a page set for the ham radio hobby side of my being. And, as President Kennedy said ". . . and do these other things."
So here and now, at this very moment unless you read this later, I am finally putting up a web site about my printing hobby. It's full of gratuitously self-promoting bullshit about me, how I came to learn how letterpress printing works and how I have managed to cobble together a collection of abused and ancient pieces of gear in the pursuit of hoarding stuff in my garage.
Little else can explain it.
So there you have it: I have letterpress print shop web site. You can go to it now, if you wish. Just remember, when you do, that I am really not quite done with it.
Before long I'll have even more pictures of stuff nobody wants to know about and even a database that you can download to view of my collection of type by face, font, foundry, case number & approximate estimated date of casting.
Have a nice trip. Mind your ps and qs
Over the course of time I soon enough learned the basics of HTML code, which allowed me to do things that the original design software either ignored or was outright incapable of fudging into what I wanted. Added to my growing understanding of how easy it was to use somebody else's design code for my own page work, this made it easy for me to dream up work-arounds in other folks' code so mine would look a bit different here or there in the process.
Then I discovered blogging.
Once I had my first blog up and verbose, I began looking at how the blog's basic background worked. Now this was a bit after I'd come to understand – for a little understanding as I might ever know – how consolidated style sheets (CSS) worked. Together with that knowledge and my working out the arcane code structure involved in the blog pages I eventually settled on a background and look that I could mess with and still find graphically inviting to readers.
Soon enough I set up my second blog, which was my first truly disbelief &/or anti-superstitionist writing. When I set that one up I took a different tack in the coding of the page lay out and eventually was able to adapt different versions of it for my third blog, a ham radio foray named after the ham radio gang I hung with back in the early 70s, Late Night Radio.
At about this point I went back over my then-extant web sites and gave them the renewed look of what I was happy with on my blogs. That, of course led me to cut back a lot on the stuff I'd done in web page construction and eventually clean up what was a real hell-hole of butchered code & horrible lay out.
Which brings us to today . . .
One of the many things that I liked about the InterWebs and the abililty for normal bean heads such as myself was the public exposure. And even when "they" said that such exposure only opened a person up to identity theft & all its wonders, I still thought "Nah, not me."
As if.
Simple fact is, and plainly put, having a web presence is like asking for trouble.
It's like living in a hippie house back in the 60s and hanging a big sign in the upstairs window that screams "BUST ME! BUST ME NOW!" at passing police cars.
And having gone through that once in my life, I'm reluctant to even think about having it happen again. Which it did, I might add, at some point in the not too distant past with the sudden appearance of six different people with my exact names on three or four web sites & chat/instant messenger boards.
Even one of my co-workers had a conversation with me while the real me was sitting right there next to my co-worker watching this all go down.
The wimp pussied out when I took the keyboard.
Undaunted by even that, I have kept some web presence for my ego to gloat over. Along the way I managed to clean up my basic pages and even develop a page set for the ham radio hobby side of my being. And, as President Kennedy said ". . . and do these other things."
So here and now, at this very moment unless you read this later, I am finally putting up a web site about my printing hobby. It's full of gratuitously self-promoting bullshit about me, how I came to learn how letterpress printing works and how I have managed to cobble together a collection of abused and ancient pieces of gear in the pursuit of hoarding stuff in my garage.
Little else can explain it.
So there you have it: I have letterpress print shop web site. You can go to it now, if you wish. Just remember, when you do, that I am really not quite done with it.
Before long I'll have even more pictures of stuff nobody wants to know about and even a database that you can download to view of my collection of type by face, font, foundry, case number & approximate estimated date of casting.
Have a nice trip. Mind your ps and qs
posted by the printer at 11:48 AM
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