Dogs dogs dogs

All the dog-related stuff swimming in my brain:

BSL everywhere. New Mexico drops their proposed pit bull ban. An Oregon senator promptly proposes a pit bull ban. Florida, Texas, and Hawaii are all still dealing with possible statewide BSL. I went away for the weekend on a relaxing trip and came back to find my inbox overflowing with necessary updates for the StopBSL website. I hate BSL. It ruins my free time and keeps me up at night, but I can't let it go, because I just can't tolerate such a massive injustice.

Star and Dozer did surprisingly well on our trip. Dozer hated it, needless to say, but he didn't destroy anything. Neither dog required crating. I actually used Star a couple of times to help catch one of the other resort visitors' little dog--it liked to run away from people but not from other dogs.

On Tuesday I'm going to go to a seminar on canine search and rescue, to find out whether Star might be at all suitable for SAR training. She loves to smell every little thing on our walks.

I just missed Intro to Agility classes at the Travis Agility Group. I will enroll Star in the next Intro class, whenever that starts up.

I got the city to agree to put up a bulletin board at the city dog park. I think it will be a good place for dog owners to share information. I especially want to put up info about free training classes, events, and legislation. I think it will be a bit easier than telling people or handing out flyers at the park, which is what I've been doing lately.

Both dogs are itching something awful. It doesn't seem to be fleas. Star has some dandruff; she might have dry skin. I have pretty dry skin too due to the dry winter, but unlike Star, I can slather lotion all over myself. I'll give Star a hydrocortisone shampoo and see if that helps her. Dozer has known seasonal allergies. Dozer will get his cortisone shot at his annual vet visit at the end of March. That should help him a lot. I would get him a shot earlier, but he isn't supposed to get the shot very frequently, and the worst time for him is usually late spring/early summer.

Back to normal, whatever that is

Titan got adopted today, and we're hoping it will stick. I think it will; the family has an extensive dog-owning history and experience with cattle dogs as well.

So with Titan's departure, I'm looking forward to cleanup. I can un-puppy-proof the house: pull down the dog toy box and the giant tiger toy (the giant lion toy succumbed to its injuries shortly after Titan discovered the stuffing inside), put away the dog crate and the extra metal bowls, wash the dog blankets and beds, vacuum, and file away Titan's adoption paperwork--or just dump it on the floor in my "to file" pile. Dozer won't care.

The timing is perfect, since it looks like I have a steady job for a while. The textbook company I'm freelancing for has started churning out chapters for me to copyedit. Yay! Work!

I'm toying with the idea of redesigning a website for a local pit bull rescue as my big donation for the holidays. They badly need a new site--their current one is outdated and unpleasant to navigate--I'm just not sure how to tactfully approach them, especially since it looks like someone took a personal interest in creating the current site, investing a lot of themselves into it. What should I say? "Wow, okay, I know you meant well when you designed this, but the purpose of your site isn't very clear. Are you trying to rescue dogs, or induce migraines?" Gah. :/

An "Aha" Moment

Let me make this clear: I'm a writer, not a coder. Not a designer. Nevertheless, yesterday I eagerly pressed F12 to launch a simulation of the new StopBSL.com website, anticipating a few minor bugs, but nothing major.

The sidebars were too wide. The body, containing the text, was too narrow. I scratched my head.

So I launched the site in Firefox and Netscape. Now it looked great. I scratched my head again.

I combed through the Dreamweaver code. Misplaced tag? Wrong table width somewhere? But it looked fine.

I launched the site in Explorer again. The columns were still all wonky. I stared. (Explorer has a reputation for needing "special treatment" in page code, but since it's the most common browser, no site designer in their right mind would ignore problems that show up in Explorer.)

I fiddled in Dreamweaver, scooting tables and boxes around, inserting spacers. Relaunch. This time, if anything, the columns were even more messed up. I started to curse.

Figuring I had a corrupt chunk of code somewhere screwing the whole thing up, I rebuilt the template from scratch. An hour later, I relaunched.

Now the text was smashed into such a narrow space that it was virtually unreadable, while the rest of the page was a sea of white. I threw a book against the wall before digging into the code yet again.

Four hours later, I had dug myself into a pit so deep that I was in a very dark place indeed. The site design was a wreck.

"Why the hell can't this be as easy as my blogs?" I shrieked.

And that's when I had an "aha" moment.

Blogs: easy to write, easy to update, easy to expand, and no design skills required.

I spent today populating the new blog-site with the text from the ruined site. Want a sneak peek? http://stopbsl.wordpress.com/

No, no, don't change your bookmarks and links. When I'm ready, I'll just redirect the StopBSL.com servers to point to the WordPress site. So when you visit http://www.stopbsl.com/, you'll see the blog-site at that address.

Heck yeah I'm a genius.

/dance

Eight pages down...

So much for one page a day. I've finished about eight pages of the new Stop BSL site since swearing an oath a few weeks ago to get the dang thing done. And while I'm pleased with the way it is coming out, I'm not pleased with how long it is taking me to research and write the new material.

The Internet nowadays is both a blessing and a curse. I can find pretty much any information I want... but the hard part is finding the source. Sites cite sites cite sites, but nobody seems to be able to identify the original source for the material. I've found dozens of sites using a particular statistic that doesn't seem to actually come from anywhere. It just appeared one day, and has been in play ever since.

And that doesn't fly for me. I've done the whole college thing, written my fair share of research papers, and been dealing with dog-related information for just under a decade now. I've seen my fair share of made-up "facts" and twisted statistics; I'm happy to trash anything that doesn't have backup documentation to go with it, even if it seemingly supports my argument.

Not that the Internet is entirely to blame. I've found some astonishingly bad "facts" in books, too, which makes my trips to the public library that much more time-consuming (and pointless, especially since I can find the same bad information if I stay home and get online).

And danged if all that trashing and sifting and weeding and selecting and searching doesn't take an ungodly amount of time. But what can I do? I'm picky about what I publish.

Some days I wish I was dealing with an easier subject. I know a lot about ducks...

MySpace gives me flashbacks

Why do I feel physically drained after spending the last two hours roaming through MySpace? It's not my first rodeo; I visited the social networking site about three years ago when I heard about how popular it was becoming. I expected something amazing, something I couldn't live without... and I was seriously let down. I went back today while doing research for a media/advertising class, holding out some serious hope that MySpace had a miraculous transformation.

Oh, the pain. As it did years ago, MySpace reminds me of a gaudy, hellish trainwreck of early 1990's websites. That's right, you remember back in the days when "good design" meant:

• A massive background image that made the overlying text impossible to read.
• Text outfitted in neon green to battle against the background image.
• Neon green font resembles medieval handwriting, size has been set to "Infinitely Tiny," and for good measure, font styles "Bold" and "Italic" added.
• A MIDI that immediately launches "Wind Beneath My Wings" at a volume that violates OSHA standards, with no clear way to turn it off
• Dozens of adorable .gifs, preferably of cartoon animals holding flowers
• Lots of blinking, flashing, shining, and rotating things, as if the page was designed by a crow
• Page layout so whack it requires horizontal scrolling

Seeing (and hearing) one MySpace page like this was enough to give me a headache. It was all I could do not to grab the phone, call my senator, and demand legislation to protect me from such vulgar displays of bad design. What I found even worse was the fact that corporations also have their own MySpace pages (sometimes multiple pages) and despite having oodles of money to pour into a decent design, their pages were no better than the rest of the rabble. Adult Swim's MySpace page (well, one of them) was full of comments from visitors that were 90% advertisements for things like credit cards, cell phone plans, and penis enlargement pills. No stylish layout, no cool images, not even any apparent marketing for Adult Swim shows -- just a bunch of garbage.

Which leads me to this final question: WHY? What the hell is the big deal? Sure, I get that you can make your own personal space and post cursory shout-outs on friends' pages, but let's look at the bigger picture here. What the hell is the point? And why does anyone else really care? Sure, I found a truckload of pit bull groups on MySpace (more groups for pit bulls than any other type or breed, in fact)... but I've found larger, more organized, more mature, thoughtful, socially beneficial, carefully monitored pit bull discussion groups outside of that chaotic hellhole. When it comes to pit bulls, weeding out the crap is extremely difficult in the first place; a trip to MySpace only makes that crap much, much more prolific, much more ingrained, and much more difficult to sort out.

Conclusion: MySpace sucks. You wanna make friends? Get a hobby and join a local club. Do some volunteer work. Go out with workmates. If you're going to seek friendship on the Internet, please, for the love of all that is holy, learn a little bit about good webpage design! I'm talkin' to you too, corporate America.