Last night was a banner day in acf history. With the ancient software an increasing risk (cue Simpsonesque explosion), it was time to either update or... I don't know. Not update I guess. Given the plethora of modifications I’d had done over the years, updating always promised to be a headache.
I contacted my web guy.
He lives in the Pacific Northwest, which is a continent away from the server in the American South, itself an ocean’s breadth from me. He’d be sitting down at his computer as I was due for bedtime. Naturally, I shifted my personal time zone to suit his working hours, which proved to be quite as elastic as mine.
We started with the colour. Fond as I was with what I had come to think of as
acf blue, I opted for the absence of all colour,
bitchin’ black. Far – for that is my web guy’s very appropriate name – then threw a totally unexpected squiggle at me, art to which he’d matched a font. I didn’t get it the first time I saw it, but when the loveliness of the segue struck me, it was like manifest destiny. It’s also like a signature, in that it may not be immediately intelligible, but it’s unique.
Far had hit one out of the park.
Next came the detail work of throwing out the kitchen sink the Simple Machines Folk have built into their software, while keeping my modified version of it on a better footing for future upgrades. It’s amazing how much work is necessary to make something simple; the work took pretty much took all night, with breaks zonked out on the couch counting sheep.
We didn’t wrap things up until late morning for me, middle of the night for Far. When I beheld the wonder he had wrought I nearly wept. With tiredness, it’s true. I know, it’s just a
rather obscure website. It’s also a canvas for painting when I’ve already got a few of those. It’s a social media construct whose only recent success has been my late night banter which straddled the globe. It’s a squiggle on the inky night.